


set a course for the sun

by orphan_account



Category: Life Is Strange (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern with Magic, Established Relationship, F/F, Future Fic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-17
Updated: 2020-07-04
Packaged: 2021-02-27 15:40:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 12
Words: 58,746
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22279540
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: “I’m not going anywhere,” Rachel said, eyes locked to hers and lips still clinging to that grin. “You don’t get to love me like you do and get off scot-free. That’s not how this works.”“Oh, so you’re my punishment, now?”A light tap of fingers against her cheekbone served as a simple enoughno.“I’m your consequence. And I’m a very,verygood one.”
Relationships: Rachel Amber/Chloe Price
Comments: 57
Kudos: 116
Collections: Favorite Amberprice Fics





	1. Prologue - Chloe

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> here's a thing

Chloe Price was reasonably sure of most things, most days. The comfort of dropping face-first into a couch after a long day of work, for example, was something she might have been able to set a clock by if feelings and time ever worked out how to work that way. The secondhand embarrassment inherent to watching as everyone on the subway shied away from an empty seat during rush hour because a single unwrapped mint was stuck to the back. The stink of diner food grease that refused to leave her clothes even after three or four washes. Most things, it turned out, were easy enough to be sure of.

Her newest problem was not most things.

Chloe lifted her head away from the cushion. She blinked the weight of sleep from her eyes, pausing for long enough to register that the blue swimming at the edge of vision was dyed hair mussed by sleep and sweat-glued to her face. She swallowed her hearing back to life, and the distant drum of running water rushed to fill the apartment, no longer hidden behind the faint tinny echoes of a first brush with awareness. It bounced from wall to undecorated wall, over floors and stacks on stacks of unopened cardboard boxes, painting the room with sounds like warmth as cleanly as the steady golden tint of evening light.

The humming came next — a simple tune she couldn’t quite place beyond _safe —_ and Chloe felt her tension vanish on a sigh. Her newest problem was not most things, but she was safe. The humming meant safety. She was sure of it.

So, she slept.

Minutes or hours later, she woke to slender fingers carding through her hair. A comforting weight, a comforting warmth on the edge of the couch pressed firmly up against the dip of her waist. A scent: designer shampoo, or expensive soap, or one of a million other products she definitely didn’t own lifted her closer to consciousness. Blackberry and roses. Dark and sweet. Rachel.

“I used your shower,” came the voice to prove it after seconds, and Chloe turned just in time, just enough, to see the curve of Rachel’s lips as they spread into an easy grin. Her cheeks were still slightly pink from the steam, and her hair was wet, clinging to her back and her shoulders; pale strawberry blonde darkened to near brown with the effect.

She looked beautiful. She felt like home. Rachel always did have a knack for that; for making Chloe ease into relaxation like no one else on earth. A teasing wink at a music festival, the faintest little quirk of a brow in the dark corner booth of a bar, or even this. Even this. Even wet hair, perfectly innocent doting, and a simple sleepy smile lit by the last fading remnants of day, and Chloe was filled with hope beyond meaning. With warmth, and with comfort, and with the blessing of knowledge that as bad as the world was, it still saw fit to let her exist next to Rachel.

They were stuck living miserable lives in New York, same as ever, but they were also two strangers turned not hurtling through the monotony of everyday hell toward something meaningful, and solid, and real. They might even have been there already, but Chloe always did have a knack for denial.

She smiled, regardless, reaching up slow for Rachel’s hand in her hair, dragging it down to her mouth, pressing her lips to the palm. “You used my shower.”

“Mhm,” Rachel said. She was almost naked, lightly tanned — and soft, so, so, _so_ soft — skin and faintly toned muscle hidden by nothing but a towel so big she looked like she was swimming in it. She was, Chloe thought, beautiful.

“Your goon gonna be okay with this?” asked Chloe, like she wasn’t already pushing further into the back of the couch and letting Rachel ease deeper into her side.

Jakob something or other, Rachel’s sometimes bodyguard, because Rachel was the kind of rich that required personal security, was okay with very little when it came to her. Time and familiarity, at least, had built up a mutual understanding that Chloe never _meant_ trouble and that his denial was purely verbal. He didn’t care on a level that might lead to action. He cared in the way of a frustrated guardian. He was _bring her back home by midnight or I’ll kill you_ personified even years after Chloe and Rachel grew out of being a pair of rebellious teens hellbent on breaking every rule on earth.

“I wonder,” Rachel teased in that intangibly easy way of hers.

Her fingers — Chloe’s slow fade of a return to consciousness made sure she wasn’t aware when they had moved to escape her grip, only that they had — were dancing lines around the rose tattoo at the curve of her spine. In and out, over and around, Rachel spread her impossible warmth through the movement; relaxing muscles like the same sort of gift as her presence. Touching without touching. Knowing without knowing. Moving like Chloe’s thoughts and desires were as clear to her as her own. She was, in that way, blessing personified. Every good thing Chloe spent years convincing herself she didn’t deserve given life in the form of one single woman.

An angel, she might have thought to call her once or twice. Back when they were kids still on the cusp of realizing how little they knew. Back when the idea of a guardian angel pulling her straight from the depths of hell hadn’t sounded so firmly on the nose that she could sometimes feel it pushing at her sinuses.

“You’re thinking so loud,” Rachel whispered, almost teasing.

“You bring it out in me.” An amused half-snort escaped before Chloe could stop it. “I fuckin’ hate it, by the way. It’s like a goddamn documentary narrator in there.”

Chloe didn’t need to turn or to look to know Rachel was smiling. She could practically taste it on the air in the short few beats between the rumble of a soft answering hum and the press of cold lips against her nape.

“Chapped,” said Chloe.

“Hmm?”

“Lips. Chapped.”

Rachel huffed a good-humored puff of air against the backs of her teeth. “You know, we could fix that problem _very_ easily if you’d stop thinking and roll over for me.”

“Oh, do go on.”

“Like, here I am, tits-out naked, and you’re just gonna lay there like you’d rather take a fucking nap.”

The words were edged. The voice, however, was not.

“Why, Rachel Dawn _Amber,_ ” Chloe said, already obediently rolling onto her back; already playing up her faint southern drawl into the entirely too enthusiastic slush she’d picked up from her mother. Rachel spilled into her lap with all the easy, long-limbed grace of someone who knew their bodies like home. “I say, in all my years, I have _never!_ ”

Palms flat against the bare skin beneath Chloe’s shirt — warm, and warm, and _warm —_ Rachel hummed. Rachel smirked. “Sexy. You know I love it when you talk like an old-timey oil magnate.”

“I did not, actually,” Chloe joked after a pause, chuckling as she ran her hands absentmindedly up and down Rachel’s thighs. She had never been much of a legs girl before Rachel — never much of a _girls_ girl either, for that matter — but then, that was Rachel through and through. Everything Chloe wanted, Rachel had it. Everything Rachel had; Chloe wanted it.

“Mhm. Be sure to jot that down,” said Rachel. A beat passed, empty of everything, full of nothing but eye contact, breathing, and the steady, soothing heat of contact. Chloe’s palms ran flat over Rachel’s legs. Up and then down. Up and down. Up. Down. Rachel’s towel fell away on her next breath. “Hey,” she exhaled. “Take me to bed, Priceless.”

A million and a half refusals chose that moment to fling themselves against the walls of Chloe’s skull; lizard brain insecurity triggering a fight or flight response like Rachel had asked for _anything_ more dangerous than the chance to break in the new apartment. Chloe could have answered. She could have at least said _no._ Instead, she grunted.

Rachel blew out a sharp breath. Her fingers froze momentarily and just as quickly set themselves back to work exploring every inch of Chloe’s body within reach. “Are you stressing about this place again?”

Chloe nodded. She inhaled as slow as she could manage and let her eyes drift closed.

“Even if I promise it’s the absolute least I could do after everything you’ve given me?” Rachel asked, hands tracing lazy back and forth against the shape of Chloe’s bra.

“ _Rachel._ ”

“Don’t you _Rachel_ me,” Rachel replied, firm and sure. “Baby, we’ve — don’t start pulling away just because I wanted you out of that house.”

“I’m not pulling away. I’m…I don’t know. Fuck.”

“You’re doing what you do every time I spend money on you and pulling away because you think it means I’m leaving.”

The grunt and the sigh Chloe let loose felt almost inevitable. The sort of decision her body would have made with or without her input. She sank into herself, slumped in the only way she could manage, pinned as she was to the couch. She shut her eyes tighter.

“Look at me, Chloe.”

Chloe obeyed.

“I’m not going anywhere,” Rachel said, eyes locked to hers and lips still clinging to that grin. “You don’t get to love me like you do and get off scot-free. That’s not how this works.”

“Oh, so you’re my punishment, now?”

A light tap of fingers against her cheekbone served as a simple enough _no_. “I’m your consequence. And I’m a very, _very_ good one.”

Chloe grunted her agreement. It sounded more anxious than she had meant it.

But Rachel being Rachel, she slipped her way further into that smile. Softer, this time. Smaller. She did not give Chloe the space to break her gaze. “I love you, Chlo. Take me to bed.”

“I love you too,” Chloe said on reflex, because she had never and would never consider anything else. Of course she loved Rachel. Even through that ridiculous nagging anxiety in the back of her head, she would always love Rachel. “But, like, I’ve gone this long without hooking myself onto whatever supervillain type shit your family is into, and it feels…I don’t know, like even letting you consider buying this place curled up some shitty rotted monkey’s paw finger on a fist waiting to punch me in the throat.”

“Always so sure it’s criminal, aren’t you?” Rachel teased with a slow drag of her nails over skin.

That, at least, Chloe knew: dropping the subject, sidestepping her concerns like maybe she was right to have them, and maybe there was some danger Rachel wanted to keep her from every bit as badly as she didn’t want to know it.

Chloe breathed deep and smirked some tint of false bravado into her voice. If Rachel could let it drop, so could she. “Of course. As something of a criminal myself —”

“I bet if you reach under the couch right this second, you’ll find a pot and a kettle waiting for you.”

“…As someone with plenty of experience loitering.”

“That’s better.”

“Smoking in non-smoking areas.”

“Kinky.”

“Committing incredibly elaborate art heists with a team of talented strangers wherein one of them inevitably betrays us all and causes the death of our well-meaning leader who was only one job away from retirement,” Chloe said, and let her hands roam up to the rise of Rachel’s shoulders. “He had a family. They always have a family.”

“Idiot.” Rachel laughed at that, kissing her quick on the tip of the nose. “Hmm. I _could_ be the spoiled rich heiress of some good old American nightmare or other, you know. Corn flakes. Vacuum cleaners. Salmon farms.”

Chloe let herself snort out a laugh.

And, for a moment, for the briefest of moments, Rachel’s expression turned serious. It turned real. She leaned back far enough and farther still, and whispered, “I could be _magic._ ”

Her irises, Chloe thought, might have flickered brighter in the sunset; hazel momentarily turned bright, bright, bright. But of course they didn’t. And Rachel smiled something small at the shock in Chloe’s eyes. So. Chloe laughed again.

“Anyway,” said Rachel. She pat once at Chloe’s collarbones like soft punctuation to the end of that moment. “We have a place of our own now, yeah? Fuck me in it. I’ll still be here tomorrow morning.”

“Oh,” Chloe whispered off the tail end of an exhale. Because… _Oh._ That hadn’t been her concern — not exactly — but it was close enough that the differences felt suddenly small enough to be worthless. They _did_ have their own place. One completely divorced from the rest of their problems.

“Yeah. Idiot. Now take me to bed.” Rachel was smiling as she spoke the words. _Do you trust me,_ sat silent in the spaces between.

 _Yes,_ Chloe thought in answer. _Yes, I do. I trust you so far down in my bones that I’m scared to wonder what these last lingering traces of distrust might mean._

Giving voice to the thought would have been more than enough. Instead, Chloe slid her hands into the still faintly damp tangle of Rachel’s hair and eased her down, eased her closer, and closer, and closer until their lips were pressed softly together.

Rachel didn’t taste like heaven, but the taste of her sang through Chloe’s mind as clearly as if she did. She wasn’t seeing that flicker in Rachel’s eyes again, but her veins were full of it, blood crackling like the flash and the glow were everywhere inside of them both, pulsing, and pulsing, and pulsing. Everything, everywhere, all of it, all at once was pressure and heat; heavy need enveloping Chloe’s senses almost faster than they could grow, and maybe, maybe, that was the answer her worries needed. Maybe, maybe, just maybe, learning to trust that indescribable fire to Rachel’s soul was the key to the lock keeping her from letting Rachel in, in the last most important ways she wanted more deeply than words could touch.

Chloe tilted her chin away just far enough to catch her breath. Just far enough to open her eyes and see Rachel’s blown-out pupils answering her final unasked question with forgiveness deep enough to drown them both.

“Hold on tight, moneybags,” she whispered with a confidence she didn’t feel, easing herself up to sitting and waiting for the answering squeeze of Rachel’s arms around her neck; of Rachel’s legs at her waist. She moved before either came, and the shocked squeal Rachel let loose as she clung on like life and death was enough to convince her that maybe there had never been anything to forgive at all. Maybe there wasn’t. Maybe Rachel knew that, too.

~*~

The bedroom, like the rest of the place, was empty save for a handful of boxes. These ones at least were opened; clothes spilled everywhere over the floor like so many tags and brands of chaos. The bed — the mattress haphazardly tossed in the far corner with nothing but some sheets and a single blanket rolled onto the floor for company — had no frame. Yet. Rachel insisted on that point every time it came up. No frame _yet._

Chloe dropped Rachel onto it without warning, smirking something halfway between loving and smug at the way she cackled through the first bounce and the next, pulling herself up onto elbows and matching Chloe’s gaze for every pound of its weight.

“Asshole,” Rachel grinned. She reached out to run the side of one foot up and down the line of Chloe’s thighs.

“That I am.”

Gentler, quieter, so softly that Chloe almost didn’t hear, Rachel added, “Get down here.”

Her eyes flickered again as she spoke. Light where there should have been none. A roaring flame where there had been only a spark. A forever of safety and comfort condensed into a momentary trick of the light. Rachel’s eyes were the sun; they were the sky opening up to share the warmth of stars, and it crushed the air straight out of Chloe’s lungs.

“I don’t know,” Chloe said, weakly swallowing the feeling down to make room for a too-easy smirk. She tugged her shirt over her head, making sure to linger and flex as casually as she could at every stop where Rachel loved to be teased. Stomach, and back, and breasts. “I’m not sure I like the idea of being ordered around by a snotty little rich girl.”

“Fuck off, you love that bratty dom shit.”

“The greatest mystery of our time,” Chloe answered without answering, still smiling. Still smiling.

Rachel’s wandering leg settled at the button of her jeans. Her toes tapped out a pattern just below the waistband. A statement. A question. Both and neither.

That, too, Chloe answered without answering. Still smiling. Still smiling. She climbed into bed, and she felt herself falling, sinking, melting without fear into the brightly flickering eternity of Rachel’s embrace.

The room, the walls, and the floor; even the bed itself were gone by then. Nothing else mattered but the comfortable constant of skin on skin and hearts beating in sync. Nothing else but Rachel’s nails scraping dull through her hair, Rachel’s voice cracking and breaking into empty pulls for breath as fuel for tongues brushing teeth, and teeth catching lips, and _Rachel,_ always there, always watching, always promising more, and more, and more.

Everything else was gone by then; everything but Rachel a distant memory at best, faded at the corners and blurred just so through the fog of lost dreams.

And then, suddenly, everything was back. Up was down, and down was up. Everything was spinning. Rachel had hooked a leg between both of Chloe’s own to lever herself up and over, and she was laughing — snickering really, restraint long lost in the tangle of everythings from short moments before — at the look of shock on her face.

“You’re thinking again,” she singsonged, eyes locked to Chloe’s as she worked at her jeans with all the ease of having done it a million times before. “I know I’m insanely gorgeous, and sexy, and perfect in literally every way, but come _on._ Humor me, I want your snark.”

“You are —”

“Thank you.”

“— a _solid_ B plus. Losing points for killing the mood.”

Rachel gasped, one hand pressed to the space beneath her collarbones for the shortest of beats before she smirked something devilish and yanked off Chloe’s jeans hard enough to hit the wall with an audible _slap._

“Chlo, you wouldn’t know a mood if it sat on your face. I didn’t kill a thing.”

“I would _so_ — angry, for instance, is a mood — and yes, you did kill it. Bullying will get you nowhere, young lady,” Chloe said, and laughed. She would have folded her arms in a pout had Rachel not answered by sliding back into her lap, that same mystery in her eyes guiding those arms to her hips. To her thighs. Like that was exactly where they had always belonged. But Rachel had. And so had she. So, she didn’t.

“Debatable. And unfortunately, smart-ass, angry’s not the mood I’m after,” said Rachel, casually as anything. She held one palm out in front of her in request, balancing the other at the base of Chloe’s ribs. “Hand.”

Chloe obeyed with a grin. “Here. Whatcha lookin’ for, then?”

“Who knows.” Rachel moved Chloe’s given hand down and lower until it was nestled comfortably between her legs, and she gave her hips the slightest tilt forward. Waiting for Chloe to get the message. She had. She moved, slipping two curled fingers into the wet heat inside, angling her palm and silently drinking up every minuscule movement of acceptance Rachel made in response. By the time Rachel managed to find an answer, she was perched somewhere on the edge of breathlessness and not. “Whichever,” she said, and gasped at the insistent press from the ball of Chloe’s hand. “Whichever mood gets you to stop acting like you haven’t been head over heels for me since we were kids.”

“Well now, darlin’, _that,_ ” Chloe drawled, playing up her accent again. “Can be arranged no problem at all.”

For a moment, Rachel tried to laugh, but the moment passed almost as soon as it came, and her voice was swallowed up in the whirlwind pull of a gasp and a moan, leaving only enough space for an, “Asshole.” She sucked in the deepest breath she could manage and lost that, too, to another insistent press from Chloe’s palm. Another crook of her fingers. Another shuddering pull for air. “Fuck you and _fuck me already_ ,” she croaked. But she was smiling. Always smiling.

Chloe hummed then, pushing herself up to an elbow. She wiggled her fingers quickly inside of her. “I’d say we’ve got that part covered well enough already.”

That, at least, kept Rachel silent beyond the shallow in and out of laughter.

Chloe pushed herself further up, kissing a line over the center of Rachel’s ribs one by one by one until she was settled between her breasts. She could feel Rachel’s heartbeat through the flood of slick at her fingers. She could feel it so clearly it nearly pulsed against the back of her own tongue. She could feel…Not words exactly, but _thought_ in its purest most untarnished form. It was there like the space between letters. It was there like molecules, and atoms, and the nothing of emptiness. A crystal-clear rush of desire hesitantly pushed in from all sides like it wanted nothing more than permission to be heard; to be seen; to be felt. It tasted like a promise: _never without asking, never unless you say yes._

Her thoughts soared out to meet that desire, and the first static spark of need as they touched turned the push to a flood. It filled her mind with the drowning force of too much emotion to name. She felt it like light. She felt it like bliss. She felt it like the same sort of naive something that had her thinking Rachel might be an angel all those years ago, and she felt the weight of a question that wasn’t her own pricking at the back of her mind.

She answered. She looked up.

Rachel was staring back, staring down, already waiting and halfway dazed out; smiling lopsided and blissful as she combed gentle fingers through the sea of blue in her grasp.

Chloe matched the expression and Rachel tugged faintly. A request. A question. Chloe answered. She moved, lapping an open-mouthed trail to the right, and sealed her mouth over the nipple. Rachel hissed out her satisfaction. A short breath later Chloe brought teeth into the equation, and Rachel did nothing but laugh again and hold her closer, and closer, and closer. The contact, suffocating in all the right ways, sent a sort of numbness racing through Chloe’s veins. Her thoughts felt clouded and her arms felt sluggish. Every sensation was magnified beyond explanation like their minds had somehow fallen into each other, deeper, and deeper still. She glanced up slow, but still in time to see a light fade from there to nothing in Rachel’s eyes: hazel green at once brighter than the moon and then gone.

Chloe shook her head. She returned to Rachel’s chest. Another trick of the light. She was full of those, lately.

“Say something,” Rachel gasped with a stuttering exhale. The light felt suddenly unimportant.

Chloe risked another glance, faster this time, for as much as that mattered. Rachel’s eyes were screwed shut, her head was tilted back, and she was there, right on the edge, close enough that Chloe could almost reach out and touch the slow spring coil of tension building in the pit of her own stomach like inhabiting both bodies at once. She risked pulling back, and when Rachel gave no resistance, Chloe allowed herself a small moment to indulge in the feeling. She kissed a lazy path up Rachel’s throat, taut muscle beneath her lips all the way up. She kissed the underside of her jaw, her cheeks, and the space just next to her lips, and she _felt_ with each and every move like something beyond the realm of reason or possibility.

“ _Please,_ ” Rachel keened, inches from begging, and so Chloe crooked her fingers again, moving harder as she emptied her mind of everything but the moment. Everything but feeling. Everything but them.

“I love you,” Chloe said, throat tight and tense. “So much. Always.”

Rachel moaned something deep from the back of her throat. That was all it took. Their shared tension splintered and snapped into a glittering starburst of relief as their lips crashed together. Rachel’s grip tightened, and tightened, and _broke,_ every muscle and tendon trembling and loose as they drifted together through the thick haze of makeshift breaths lined on both ends with the smallest beginnings of words. They were one shared mind. They were two. They were together. They were apart. They were everything at once.

For a time, that was all. Breath, and touch, and heat, and heat, and _heat._ Bodies unmoving but for the struggle of breath and a return to themselves. Chloe knew she should ask. She didn’t know where to start. It mattered. It didn’t. It was nothing. It was the most important thing.

“Good,” Rachel husked, still crawling a path back to herself. “I’m good.”

“Yeah?”

A pause. A nod. “Yeah.”

And so, Chloe eased them both back into the mattress. Back into the pillows. Back far enough that Rachel was free to wriggle herself around into a more comfortable position tucked up against her side and set to blindly drawing shapes through the vines and the thorns of her arm tattoo.

“Hey,” Chloe started.

“Hmm?”

“How…What was —”

Rachel interrupted before she could decide how to phrase the question. “Oh, hold on, is your pipe anywhere around here?”

Which meant they were dropping it, then. Chloe thought for a moment. She wasn’t sure there was a way to ask what had happened without sounding eight different kinds of crazy; maybe dropping it was the right choice. She sighed and glanced up in a way that probably looked less like frustration than it was, and found the pipe in question sitting on the edge of the windowsill.

“No,” she lied, deadpan. “It’s packed with all the kitchen stuff.”

“Is it really?” asked Rachel, frozen with disbelief.

“God, no. Can you imagine?” Chloe snorted, reaching up blindly until she had both it and the lighter in her grip. She kissed Rachel soft on the forehead as she handed them over. “Here.”

The chuckle Rachel sighed out over how empty it was might have mattered in another context. On another night. Instead, Chloe watched peacefully as Rachel shrugged to herself and mumbled out a _Good enough,_ before taking a too-long pull from what little was left. She didn’t exhale as she stretched up to place the two back in their place, but she _did_ make sure to share the smoke through a kiss as she slipped her way back into Chloe’s arms. To cup Chloe’s cheeks in both of her palms and show — clearly this time, beyond any shadow of doubt — that the trick of the light hadn’t been a trick of the light at all. Her nerves lit up with pleasure like starlight.

“Oh,” Chloe gasped.

“Yeah,” Rachel whispered like she was waiting for the drop.

Chloe could have asked for an explanation. _Should_ have. She didn’t. She reached up to cover Rachel’s hands with her own. She kissed her again. And, with the sun long since set and the cool peace of exhaustion seeping into the air, that was how things stayed.

Chloe’s thumb running back and forth over Rachel’s shoulder, the scrape of callouses raising skin in ways that always seemed to make Rachel happy. Small talk and laughter like light, like blinding-bright proof that Rachel was salvation burning safety into their tiny little corner of dark. The dying smoke of too-burned weed. The sharp smell of a dry summer night. Someone’s lips on the bridge of someone else’s nose, and moving, shifting, throwing sheets back toward somewhere closer to _off,_ and the flickering needlepoint flash of return to shared thought and sensation as easily as fingers to touch.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i've been planning this out for awhile now, hope you all enjoy where it goes!


	2. Chloe

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Mmh. Your favorite bartender would be bawling her eyes out if it ever got loose,” Rachel said, forcing down her smile. She cleared her throat before continuing on, louder. “Do you remember when we first met?”
> 
> “I remember you telling me _I_ was the corny one.”
> 
> “Bite me. Answer the question.”
> 
> Chloe nipped lightly at Rachel’s knuckles. She answered the question.

“Good morning, sunshine,” Rachel whispered. Her voice came oddly lyrical, floating with the lightness of a joke Chloe couldn’t place.

After one slow breath and another, she realized: Rachel was poking fun at her accent. Chloe didn’t bother to open her eyes. She stuck out her tongue. She pulled Rachel closer, burying her face and her squeals of laughter both hard against her chest long enough for sound to settle back into silence. The easy rhythm of breathing.

Eventually, Rachel recovered back to tapping out another of her countless mystery tunes over Chloe’s skin. Her arms were folded along the line of Chloe’s clavicle, head perched between both as the full of her weight rested on Chloe’s body. Feeling carried through the mattress as Rachel kicked one leg slowly up, then dropped it to raise the other. It came once, and twice, and again, a steady rhythm like the beat of a heart.

Chloe sighed, less a response to the joke than a way to signal that she was still awake, still listening. “Too much.”

“Of?” Rachel asked. She stretched her arms slow to tangle fingers in Chloe’s hair, and when she pressed a kiss to Chloe’s sternum, they both smiled barely wider.

“Enunciating,” Chloe said. Yawned. “Too much.”

Rachel clicked her tongue against teeth.

“You’ll get it one of these days.”

“Obviously. And hey, who knows, maybe all this failure will give me enough time to figure out the secret to your ridiculous charm,” Rachel said. Her lips brushed Chloe’s chest again, this time slower. This time with just enough tongue lapping out like the smallest sort of tease. Her fingers tightened their grip on Chloe’s hair. “Can you imagine? That _and_ the accent? I’d be unstoppable.”

“Oh, for sure. I got charm leakin’ outta all sorts of holes.”

“ _Hot._ ”

“You know it. And anyway, I’m always happy to be made obsolete for a worthy cause. Let someone else deal with the burden of being me,” Chloe said, and trailed off in a moan when Rachel continued teasing that spot on her chest. She half-opened her eyes at the feeling.

Rachel exhaled, breath ghosting both warm and cold over her skin. “I suppose I’m nothing if not a worthy cause.”

“The worthiest.”

It was not, Chloe realized as her vision adjusted, morning. The moon was still shining. The crickets were still chirping. The air still sharp and cool in that way of nights so late they had finally escaped the stink of the day. She met Rachel’s gaze; breathtaking hazel green filled with the light of stars just the same as they had been before.

Something in her, though she couldn’t place what — an instinct, a feeling, a constant tide of awareness over how Rachel lived — had assumed the presence in her mind would fade as she sank into the shapeless blur of dreams. And it might even have, but Rachel had stayed awake. She stayed swimming through that void between thoughts, coaxing the shape of them into something soothing, and calming, and wonderful. That they were back to using words felt like a signal of sorts. A break in the night. A reminder that no matter how happy Rachel was, maintaining their connection for so long had exhausted them both. A gift made expressly to pluck them nerve by nerve into pieces for the opportunity to build themselves back up. They both needed sleep. _Real_ sleep.

Chloe tugged her arms free from beneath her head, her pillow. She threaded her fingers with Rachel’s, kissing their joined knuckles one after the next, eye contact unbroken every step of the way. The light faded from Rachel’s eyes as she moved, that supernatural something she’d offered up like a blessing giving way for the calm of normality.

She was her again. Just her. And she was grinning ear to ear, eyes and nose scrunched up as her cheeks filled slow with the faintest traces of pink.

“What’s up?” Chloe asked, resting the last of their knuckles gently against her lower lip.

“You’re so fucking corny sometimes,” Rachel whispered.

Chloe winked and kissed Rachel’s knuckles again. “Make sure you keep that dirty little secret between us.”

“Oh, sure, sure.”

“All my adoring fans would be heartbroken; you understand.”

“Mmh. Your favorite bartender would be bawling her eyes out if it ever got loose,” Rachel said, forcing down her smile. She cleared her throat before continuing on, louder. “Do you remember when we first met?”

“I remember you telling me _I_ was the corny one.”

“Bite me. Answer the question.”

Chloe nipped lightly at Rachel’s knuckles. She answered the question. “Course I do. Why? What’s up?”

Of _course_ she remembered. She was sixteen, buying a pack of cigarettes at the bodega down the street from her old home. The one where the owner never cared that she was a kid because everyone knew her, and _everyone_ knew what her stepfather was like. In walked Rachel like she wasn’t the richest girl in school on the wrongest side of town, and somewhere in the whirlwind of misunderstanding over her flirting, Jakob’s dramatic entrance, and Chloe’s gut-deep cackling, the three of them nearly ended up chased out into the street. It was the first and last time she was ever accused of kidnapping. It was the first and last time she ever watched someone beg for the chance to apologize by taking her out for dinner and a movie _._

The dinner ended up being greasy food truck tacos and the movie was some black and white horror showing at a park they heckled all the way through. Jakob and a few other members of Rachel’s security detail were there the entire time, glaring holes into Chloe’s head. It was terrible. And then it kept going.

They walked, and they talked, and they ducked down an alley — mercifully out of sight of their chaperone parade — to steal some small pieces of time for themselves. They had a heart to heart about all the things Rachel had spent nearly a year hoping to say. They even made out a little bit before Jakob finally realized they were hiding behind a dumpster. It was _terrible._ It was the best night of Chloe’s life. It was the start of too many firsts and lasts to count.

“I want greasy food,” Rachel said then, pulling Chloe back to reality. She sounded thoughtful. Peaceful, like she was following along the exact same thread of memory. Like Chloe would always be an open book no matter whether she could reach out and touch her thoughts like words on a page or not. “Like, enough to put that taco truck to shame. Dripping through the bag levels of grease. I’m gonna go see if anywhere is still open.”

Chloe’s failed attempt at stifling a laugh escaped as a strangled sort of snort. She watched, sleepy eyes on Rachel as she rolled out of bed and sprang excitedly to her feet. A silent minute passed, Rachel digging through the boxes of clothes for something to slip into before she settled on an old band tee. Faded black cotton and a hem that barely cleared her hips. A discolored, cracking logo too illegible to read even when it was new, and sleeves chopped clean off. Seeing it again was like being thrown through time to relive Rachel’s excited _no, Chloe, you don’t understand, the sideboob action in this thing is incredible,_ as she stole it for herself all those years ago.

And then she was gone. Watching her leave without a second glance — entirely too graceful, even for the always of her usual — felt right in a way Chloe knew would never fit the shape of words. Nights with Rachel always left her at peace, but after everything she’d seen in the short space of hours, she knew something had changed. Something that would always be changed. She was happy for it.

Chloe smiled and pushed herself back to lean against the wall. She took a breath, slow, and steady, and deep; the sort of thing that strained her lungs to their limits for the chance to brush up against the weight of peace pushing down on her chest. Two, and she was ready to follow after; to see what kind of problems Rachel was making for herself. Three, and ice-cold water dripped onto her hairline.

“What,” she mumbled to herself. Another drop fell, and she looked up; reached up to wipe them both away.

When she pulled her fingers back, her stomach dropped. They were coated in a deep reddish brown. She tried to stand, but the ground rose up to hit her hard, tile and a shattered mess of glass and ceramic that hadn’t been there before taking scattered positions around her. Pieces of a painting. Untouchable scenery, close enough to see and forever out of reach.

Some part of her knew — barely, less than barely — that things were wrong, that she might be hurt, but it was a distant knowledge. An echo of a fear someone else might have once held for her. The fear was distant, too. All she felt was an empty sort of awe at the silence of the place. She could hear her own breath, her own heartbeat, her own strangled attempts at swallowing moisture back into her mouth like they were amplified ten times over, but everything beyond that ceased to exist. Everything past her skull was nothing but too-muffled echoes and indecipherable bass.

She risked looking around. She was sitting crumpled and propped up against a kitchen sink in some other house, in some other place, the air thick and heavy with the smell and the taste of copper. It burned through her nostrils. It coated her tongue. Everything was broken in ways that felt deeper than accident.

Some part of her she couldn’t find the strength to recognize was still coherent enough to register that that detail was very bad, but it was hard to pay it much attention when her body was already moving on and making another attempt at shoving itself to standing. Her head, like the rest of her, shook itself out like it had simply up and decided it couldn’t wait for her thoughts to catch up, and —

And —

Everything was normal. She was in her apartment. She was standing in her room, out of breath and trembling to the bone. Somewhere in the distance, a dog barked exactly once.

“Fuck,” Chloe exhaled. “What the _fuck._ ”

She sucked in a sharp breath, pushed it out through her teeth, and felt her legs give out beneath her. She collapsed back onto the mattress. It was a struggle to stay sitting, but somehow, she managed. Somehow, she summoned the strength to dig her nails into the foam of the bed hard enough to shred; her heels into the hardwood floor enough to feel the pressure down in the marrow. Her hands were in her hair before she realized they had moved, palms dragging through hard enough to hurt, and she allowed herself a moment to thrive on the pain. Evidence of reality. Evidence that whatever she had just seen was the result of her imagination running wild. Some lingering trace of Rachel’s presence in her mind accidentally bumping up against a door it shouldn’t have.

The explanation she never bothered asking for felt suddenly more important. She should have asked. She should have asked.

As she moved to do just that, Chloe held her hands out limply in front of her, hoping — maybe naively — for one last reassurance that what she saw was nothing more than some delirium fueled nightmare toying with her senses. The natural end result of a week spent working too much and sleeping too little, of two souls cracked open and traded like offerings.

Dried blood flaked away. Her heart was hammering in her chest, breath coming shallow and stilted, and she knew with a bone crushing surety that she hadn’t been seeing things before just like she wasn’t seeing things now. She knew where she was. She didn’t know where she was. Someone had called, or maybe they hadn’t. She was so sure at the time it had been Joyce, because who else but her mother would ask like they had for her to come over? It hadn’t mattered in the end. Maybe no one called. Probably, no one called. Two bodies, limp and unmoving, sprawled out across the floor in front of her.

A knife pinned one of them down by the thigh. No matter how long she looked, Chloe couldn’t tell which. Darkness had curled and wisped in to tunnel her vision too long ago to remember, and details beyond the knife, beyond the bodies, may as well have not existed.

Her next inhale was empty, the exhale rough and staggered like air she hadn’t actually pulled inside her lungs stubbornly refusing to leave. Distantly, she recognized that she was laughing a desperate, hysterical sort of laugh. It was more of an intellectual realization than anything; she didn’t know what her mind hoped she might do with the knowledge.

One of the bodies, the one stuck to the knife, moaned. The sound was gruff and deep, and one of its hands flew uncontrolled for the handle piercing its leg. At first, it missed and flew wide, but the next attempt knocked the entire blade inches to the side, and the body dropped dead with a final gurgling groan.

Chloe was on her feet in an instant. She was scrambling for the door, stumbling over cardboard boxes as she tripped into the hall, and —

“ _Hey,_ ” Rachel mouthed more than called. She waved Chloe over from her place at the kitchen counter, her other hand preoccupied holding her phone to her ear. Her back was arched like she was putting on a show: chest low, hips up, arms forward.

“Hey,” Chloe whispered back. It earned her a sleepy answering smile. The lazy sort of drawing up of a muscle in her face like Rachel had practiced the exact movement necessary to fill Chloe up with more warmth than anything else on earth.

She slipped in quietly behind her, resting both hands on the bare skin of her hips and pressing herself softly against the backs of her thighs. Rachel chuckled and spun fast to face her, that same smile cracking at her lips even as she apologized to the person on the other end of the line. Even as she brushed a strand of hair behind her ear like she always did when she was nervous. Or surprised. She poked Chloe gently on the nose, breathed a small breathy end to her laughter, and just like that, the shocked something was gone.

Seconds passed, and the small of Rachel’s back was pressed to the counter, her eyes locked on Chloe with far more intent than her voice might have implied. They felt less than an instant from shining bright enough to blind, and a presence like the sun roared to life in Chloe’s mind, wrapping around every shape of every thought easier than arms at her waist. Easier than a chest pressed to her back. Lips on her neck. Seconds passed, and Chloe felt herself falling into Rachel as effortlessly as if she had never known anything different. More, and the call was over. More, and the presence was gone.

Rachel tossed her phone away, slipped free with an ease that said she had never been trapped at all, and wandered off slowly toward the couch. “That was Jakob,” she said, and dropped into the far corner with a groan.

“Tease.”

“You love me.”

“ _Hmm,_ ” Chloe hummed thoughtfully. “I thought you wanted food?”

“I do, but it’s like three in the morning. I’m not about to rope some poor Uber driver into dealing with us,” she said, gesturing at herself and the apartment in turn. “Jakob promised to grab burritos from that place you like. The twenty-four hour one with the really nice old lady who thinks you don’t eat enough.”

“You know he’s just gonna try to drag you back to your super-secret evil lair.”

“He would, were either of us wearing clothes. _You,_ Chloe Price, know how he gets when we smell like sex. He’s just gonna make one of his little minions deliver it.”

A grin cracked at the edges of Chloe’s mouth, and her eyes fell closed. She dipped her head to the side in acknowledgment. “Points for creativity.”

“Ah, she finally recognizes my genius! I think that deserves a reward.”

Chuckling quietly, Chloe pushed herself off the counter. When she opened her eyes, Rachel was gone. The apartment, too, faded out like a mirage. She was alone in the dark.

The old metal bench she was sitting on squeaked under her sudden movement. Everywhere, streetlights were shining hazy and gold, flickering the scene back and forth from darkness. Chloe tried to think, to retrace her steps, but everything was indecipherable blurs. She couldn’t remember a thing but the dark and the blood.

A rustling noise started and stopped at Chloe’s side. She turned just in time to watch a raccoon emerge from a rusted-out trash bin. They held eye contact for what felt like hours but was probably only seconds, and the raccoon, evidently satisfied that Chloe wasn’t a threat, crawled calmly away. Chloe wondered what it saw in her. As if in answer to the thought, one of the nearby streetlights flickered fast and then slow.

Across the street was a rundown bodega Chloe wasn’t sure she recognized. The signs stuck to the doors and the cat napping in the windowsill felt familiar enough, but beyond that, she couldn’t recall a thing. Maybe she had met someone there, once. Maybe something had started there. Maybe every bodega looked roughly the same in the dark. A man with thinning hair and an oversized polo shirt sat behind the register, visible even from her distance. He seemed to notice her. Seemed to recognize her, even. Chloe wasn’t entirely sure what to make of that.

The man threw himself through a double take. He raised an unsure fist in her direction, pointing his thumb up and then down in some silent question only he could know but Chloe understood regardless. _Are you okay?_

Chloe wasn’t entirely sure she knew the answer. She shrugged and returned the man’s thumbs up. It seemed like the right thing to do. With a lazy nod, his attention returned to whatever had been occupying it before, and the silence returned to surround Chloe’s awareness. Another streetlight flickered. Some few feet away, a car skidded to a stop. A door opened and closed, and a woman with long strawberry blonde hair nearly fell face-first onto the sidewalk in her frantic efforts to climb out of the passenger seat.

“Rachel,” Chloe said. She didn’t know why. She didn’t know how loud.

The woman’s voice rang out, much too distant for how close she was. It felt for a moment like the world of sound might still be trapped outside her skull, but then the woman spoke again, crystal clear. “Chloe?”

“Rach,” Chloe tried again, too quiet. Volume control still felt beyond her; she wasn’t sure she was speaking at all. “Rachel.”

The woman didn’t answer, not that Chloe had expected it, so she dropped her head and waited for everything to return to the quiet of night. Only, everything didn’t. A hand brushed her cheek and tilted her gaze up.

“Chloe, holy shit,” came the woman’s voice, breathless.

Warm hazel eyes were waiting when Chloe’s vision finally adjusted. The woman was watching her. She was beautiful, her features somehow sharp enough to cut clean through every emotion she was wearing until nothing else remained but that strange unwavering beauty. People weren’t beautiful when they worried. When they feared. And yet…

“— hear me?”

“Rachel,” Chloe gasped.

“I’m right here, baby,” answered the beautiful woman. “Can you hear me?”

Chloe nodded. A second set of footsteps, calmer than the woman’s, came closer, and Chloe let her eyes drift in their direction. A man. Older than the woman. Larger by far. Tall, and stout, and too tall to be stout. His dark hair was short and messy, like he’d long since given up trying to tame it into something neat, but his beard at least pretended to be groomed. White streaked through them both more endlessly than the stars. He looked stern, and Chloe felt a strange pulse of emotion over the knowledge that she could still somehow differentiate _stern_ from _angry._ It felt like the sort of thing that might deserve a smile. The man did not smile back.

“Chloe,” the beautiful woman said again, and Chloe let her head loll back in her direction. Evidently, she had dropped to kneeling when Chloe wasn’t looking.

“Hmm?”

“Do you need a doctor?” the woman asked, then turned to the giant man at her side. “Maybe we should get her to a hospital.”

The man didn’t answer, only scowled deeper and rolled up his sleeves. Watching him felt like watching the night sky.

Chloe pulled her eyes away, remembering the question. “Right now?”

That seemed to amuse the beautiful woman and her warm hazel eyes enough that some of her worry vanished like mist. Not all, but some.

“Or later,” she said, trying on a smile and a laugh that didn’t quite fit. She squeezed at Chloe’s hands. When they had started holding hands, Chloe wasn’t sure, but it didn’t seem to bother the woman, so it didn’t bother her either. Maybe that was why the woman kept talking. Joking, like she couldn’t quite sort out how to make herself stop. “For your birthday, maybe? An anniversary present? You know, whenever. Whatever you need.”

Smiling back felt like the right thing, so Chloe did. The woman squeezed again at their joined hands.

“Rachel,” the older man said. His voice sounded like the exhaust of a truck. In the distance, sirens grew louder. He spared them a glance, and his expression went hard. It felt closer to anger, that time. “None of that blood is fresh.”

Some few strands of the woman‘s hair came loose from where she had tried tucking it behind her ears, and she forced it back into place with trembling hands. She didn’t answer for several long breaths.

“You’re sure?” she started, turning only momentarily to scowl at the man. It felt to Chloe like a dare. A challenge to deny her. Evidently satisfied, the woman turned back to meet Chloe’s gaze. “Shit, that’s… _Shit,_ Chloe what happened to you?” she asked, brushing the pads of her fingers too gently over Chloe’s jaw. She took a deep breath and went through the motions to tuck hair out of the way again, despite that nothing was out of place. She nodded to herself. “Okay. Chloe, we need to get you out of here. Can you walk?”

“Okay,” Chloe said.

“Okay, you can walk?” asked the woman again, like she didn’t quite believe.

“Mhm,” Chloe answered.

“Chlo, baby, tell me what you just agreed to.”

Truthfully, she didn’t remember much of anything. Nodding felt like the right thing, so Chloe did. Standing felt like the right thing, so Chloe did that, too. She pushed confidently to her feet, shook the sleep out of one leg, and promptly blacked out.

In the dark of her dreams, she was chased through shapeless places by an ink-black monster of shadow. Four glowing eyes sat deep in what might have been its skull. It sprouted hundreds of sinewy limbs to propel itself forward and it used its countless jagged claws to tear up the walls like they were barely even there. It dug through the floors like paper. The monster chased her through rooms that didn’t exist and places that made no sense. In one, Chloe was a child again. In another, she was with a girl she didn’t recognize, though she knew she should have. The girl had short brown hair, countless freckles, and she shared innocent secrets like they weren’t both busy running for their lives.

Before long, the maze of impossible rooms led Chloe to a dead end. She tripped, and fell, and only just barely turned in time to watch as the monster raised one of its bubbling, hulking arms. Its eyes grew brighter, and brighter, and brighter, until Chloe’s vision faded to nothing.

~*~

She was laid out across the back seat of a car when she woke. One moving, judging by the blurred pulse of lights. Her head was resting in the beautiful woman’s lap. The one with the same name as Rachel. The one with the hazel eyes. Judging by the way her conversation with the giant man carried on uninterrupted, they hadn’t yet noticed Chloe was awake.

The man’s voice rose like he was in the middle of a lecture, though Chloe struggled to make out more than stray bits and pieces. The beautiful woman only made him more frustrated every time she spoke up. Something about that fact made Chloe happy. She pulled her left arm up off the floor mat and reached for one of the hands cradling her head. An instinct, more than any real confidence that hands would be there. But they were. Chloe tangled her fingers with the woman’s and squeezed.

“— to keep the kid low because she’s covered in blood. Don’t ask stupid questions.”

At first, the hazel eyed woman didn’t respond. Chloe caught herself wondering briefly whether it was because she agreed with the man, but when she finally allowed herself to look, the woman was smiling down at her like she was on the brink of tears. Like maybe, somehow, her safety was important. The thought pierced Chloe straight to her core. She felt herself forgetting to breathe, and might have even stayed that way had the woman not run her other hand through Chloe’s hair like maybe she already knew exactly how well it worked to soothe her nerves.

Their new comfortable silence remained for so long that Chloe lost track of the time and the argument entirely. Long enough that she felt less than seconds from sinking back into sleep. The woman’s hands never once stopped or slowed.

“Jakob,” the woman with Rachel’s name said finally. Streetlights continued passing. New, brighter colors rose to join their rhythm until eventually Chloe could feel the constant of their neon glow through the backs of her eyelids.

The giant man sighed. Chloe felt sleep becoming harder to avoid with every slow roll to a stop and every steady push back to movement.

“What,” said the man. It didn’t sound like a question.

“— about this feels wrong.”

“Of course it does, look who we’re —”

The woman went quiet. After so long Chloe was convinced the argument had stopped again, she said simply, “Don’t.”

“— one fucking day apart and the idiot gets herself involved in —”

“— sleeping, please don’t start.” Another pause. Chloe nearly forgot her body before the woman continued. “Where are —”

“— hotel. That apartment of yours isn’t —”

Following along only proved more and more useless as they went; extra weight pushing Chloe further into the grip of sleep. She didn’t fight. She fell willingly into it, letting the warmth wash over her like millions of scattered memories of eyes like the heavens and lips like the sun. She did not dream.

The next time she came to, Chloe was being led with an arm hooked over one of the beautiful woman’s shoulders through a blur of large halls and larger rooms. At first, they were cold: cement, and metal, and coils of wire like massive pulsing tree roots cutting in and out of the walls. At first, the electric hum of it all blurred her senses into meaningless white noise. But only at first. It wasn’t long before the halls grew warm. As warm as the woman’s eyes. Warmer. Each new step was more than the last: golden lights, floors of impossible geometric patterns, and walls so dark they seemed to go on forever. It felt like swimming through illusions. It felt like breaking through a barrier and being unable to will her vision to focus.

Just ahead, she felt the giant man’s presence, but she drifted off before she could ask either stranger for answers to the questions she was too tired to remember.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> its fine chloe its all normal stuff that happens to everyone


	3. Jakob

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Figure out what the fuck happened.” Rachel said, and pushed a single shaky breath through her teeth. “She’s family.”
> 
> Jakob signaled for one of the guards on either side of the elevator down the hall to take his place. They were new hires, still unfamiliar with Rachel and the small inches she was from snapping, but they didn’t need to interact.
> 
> He turned back to Rachel. “She’s also very stupid. Don’t leave her alone for too long.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> curveball

Ten seconds after Rachel slammed the door in Jakob’s face, he set himself to thinking.

Twenty seconds, and the roughest shapes of ideas were slowly forming themselves into something useful. Acting would need to wait until Rachel felt satisfied enough with Chloe’s safety to risk leaving her alone — Jakob needed her to know what was happening before he was gone — but he could make use of his time until then. No matter whether the Houses agreed on the point or not, Chloe was one of his. Something happened to her on his watch, and every one of his instincts were already stuck reaching back for the place they’d found her, hoping for the chance to tear the scene down to molecules in search of an answer. He _was_ going back.

Chloe wasn’t the sort to crack over something so small as a little blood. Whatever happened, it was big enough to break her. Which meant one of two things.

First, that he was wrong about her; that there were secrets she’d kept hidden for years, even from him, and that she was involved in something dangerous. He did not want to be wrong. He’d made his career out of not being wrong.

The second possibility — and the one far more unfortunate — was that something new had forced its way in from outside the lines of her life. Maybe it wasn’t magic, maybe it was simply an unfamiliar violence. Home robbery gone wrong. Family abuse gone too far. A true and genuine accident gone on too long. But. Maybe, too, magic _was_ involved.

Unspoken rules of etiquette shared between Houses were meant to prevent it, but the reality was, _Of the family, not the House,_ was as much an insult as it was a shield. House business stayed between Houses. House magicians did not involve ordinaries under any circumstances. The safety and secrecy of the Houses was paramount. Which meant, mostly, that beyond the scope of work and of public relations, House magicians kept to themselves.

Amber House had always held the benefit of being necessary enough for their somewhat lenient view on the matter to be seen as one more easily ignorable quirk; one more problem in the barrel of problems that were the keepers of deceit. They existed to maintain House secrecy through any means necessary; if a problem needed solving, if a person needed erasing, if an example needed making, they were called. In the past, that fact meant their judgment and discretion were trusted without question. Less and less so as years went by. Ridiculous opinions of the wealthy on _bloodlines_ and _destiny_ and the importance of rediscovering _the bond_ made sure of it. Always wasn’t forever. Opinions changed. Maybe something in the leadership finally snapped.

And then there were the witches, a uniquely frustrating bag of problems. Chloe lived perched on a ledge between both sides of the world of magic that few others ever had. She had history. Before, that meant nothing. Now, it meant she was vulnerable.

Jakob grumbled out a sigh and ruffled a hand through his hair. Thinking never did him any good without help, he was too used to problems simple enough to be solved with a bullet. More than anything, what he needed was to notify his contact and go back to the scene. Learn what he could.

Behind him, the door cracked open.

“Jakob.”

He threw a glance over his shoulder, turning only when Rachel stepped into the hall. She kept one fist gripped tight at the metal of the handle, surrounded on all sides by the endless, starless void of the Amber House walls. He did not answer.

“Chloe still isn’t saying anything, but,” Rachel went on. Her voice was worn down with exhaustion and fear, even as she tried to hold herself strong. It was good she still had her strength. She would need it to piece that girl back together. “We picked her up down the street from Joyce’s place.”

The same detail that had been worrying him. Back when Chloe first entered their lives, Jakob put her through the usual routine of background checks and investigations. He’d looked into every detail of her life that might have mattered, all the way down to her great aunt’s favorite color, and he still knew the details like the back of his hand. Her past was…Unique. History. Possibilities. Pieces on the board for a game he couldn’t understand.

Around ten years ago, a friend of hers was picked up by witches shortly after leaving the state with her family. She led, as far as he could tell, the normal life of a normal girl. Being brought into a coven hadn’t been a malicious act. Not that it ever was; witches were harmless. They cared after their own and only butted heads with the Houses when their safety was at risk. Magicians ejected from the world of magic and so set to building their own. The friend was harmless.

Or so Jakob hoped. Recent circumstances meant it was impossible to know without being there to see the scene. No one was immune to personal vendettas. What mattered at the time was that _Chloe_ was harmless.

Similarly, her abusive stepfather had only been something of note in the way street names were something of note; absentminded knowledge that came and left on a whim. The sort that resurfaced without being asked. Without being learned. The stepfather was prone to anger, to violence, to acting out in desperate fits to retain some sense of authority over stumbles in his life.

At the time, it meant Chloe was harmless, even if her family was not. Recent circumstances meant the stepfather was important.

Her birth father was the only part of her past he never quite managed to pin down. The only detail he’d ever managed to confirm beyond that he died was that he was a good man. She’d lived a past alongside monsters and ghosts, and still, she was harmless.

“You don’t get to use this as proof she would’ve been safer with us,” Rachel said, grip on the door white-knuckled with fury. “Not you.”

Jakob made a rough noise from somewhere deep in his throat. He hadn’t been planning to bring it up — wasn’t even sure it _was_ safe after his fall from the boss’ grace — but Rachel was scared, and she was allowed to slip as she worked through that fear.

“Look at me, Jakob,” she ordered. He looked.

She commanded with the same ease as her father. And yet…She had neither the desire or the talent for Amber House’s line of work. The only time she’d ever shown a willingness was when it came to Chloe, and even then, only to protect. Only for their future. _Of the family, not the house._ Jakob sympathized with both kids more than they would ever know.

“You’re going back out there.” Rachel meant it as a question. Her irises seemed to flicker faintly brighter. A trick of the light, gone as soon as it arrived.

“Mhm.”

“Figure out what the fuck happened.” Rachel said, and pushed a single shaky breath through her teeth. “She’s family.”

Jakob signaled for one of the guards on either side of the elevator down the hall to take his place. They were new hires, still unfamiliar with Rachel and the small inches she was from snapping, but they didn’t need to interact.

He turned back to Rachel. “She’s also very stupid. Don’t leave her alone for too long.”

She nodded, only barely managing a weary smile as she slipped back into her room. The digital lock beeped shut, green light flashing red, and without another word Jakob turned to leave. To think.

If Chloe had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time, he would help. He would see to it that she was protected and let things fall how they may. Rachel might decide bringing her into the fold was safest. She might not. She might use what happened as further motivation for the escape she thought Jakob didn’t know about. As if he hadn’t spent years training her for it under the guise of protection.

But if Chloe hadn’t — if it was the work of something bigger and she just so happened to be the first in line to get hurt — he would put in the work, and he would kill some people. Either possibility was fine so long as he could see her back to safety.

The elevator doors lurched open. He stepped inside.

~*~

Jakob was right. He hated being right.

Half the street was blocked off, filled to overflowing with squad cars, onlookers, and makeshift barriers. Nearly four houses had been absorbed into the crime scene. It felt like watching a terrible daytime whodunnit; the otherwise quiet residential street, the kind he grew up on — chain link fences, rotted wood, and worn-down siding — turned loud and hostile. Still, it was good people were gawking. Crowds made the next part of his plan easier. More eyes meant less people wondering whether he belonged.

Jakob pulled the nondescript Toyota he’d taken with him into a driveway two houses down from the crowd. No one paid him any attention beyond some few cursory glances. They waved, and he waved back, one more easily forgotten face. A wrongness settled over him almost the instant the car settled into park.

It wasn’t an obvious wrong; he felt it in his skin, in his bones, in the rush of blood as his pulse fought not to speed up. Magic, but wrong.

In normal circumstances, magic existed everywhere. It was in everything. It _was_ everything, and if Jakob reached out with what coursed through his veins, he could feel it in the crowd as clearly as he could see frustration on their faces; a sixth sense of sorts easily wielded by those with the talent.

Which was exactly how he knew something was wrong. The magic in the air was different. Tainted. Lingering residue of something that shouldn’t have happened and shouldn’t exist. The space behind the police barriers was practically hazy with it, and he scanned over every individual body in sight, hoping me might find the source.

He did not. Instead, he found a woman wading calmly toward the house at the center of it all. She wore a deep green blouse, and her eyes were so blue they seemed nearly black; so vivid their color was clear even in the midst of the flashing lights. She was so small she barely rose above the shoulders of her colleagues. And she turned. She locked eyes with him like no one else in the world existed but them.

His contact. She was already there, already waiting, hadn’t bothered notifying him despite his proximity to the family, his proximity to _her,_ simply expected him there. That almost made it worse. That Chloe’s problem had become a House investigation before he’d been able to learn what it was, he could accept. The concern that acceptance left him with, he could not.

“Fuck,” Jakob grumbled under his breath. He hated being right.

He shoved himself out of the car and toward the nearest officer in sight.

“Sir,” the officer tried to say. “You can’t —”

With one hand, Jakob pulled his wallet from his back pocket and presented it like a badge. He clapped his other hand down on the officer’s shoulder, towering over him as he reached out with his mind, with the icy constant of magic flowing through his veins until a pulse that wasn’t his faded along the fringes of awareness.

It ran parallel to his own, but it was unsteady. Rushed. Panicked. He calmed it with a thought no more complex than a blink: the stranger was tense, then he wasn’t. Jakob dove deeper with another: he was outside, then he wasn’t, falling further and further, pulled along by the rhythm of being until he was staring down the very core of the officer’s life, dulling his senses and choking out thought over the back of confusion and disorientation.

“Jakob Murton,” he said, at once pocketing his wallet and returning his hands to himself. “I consult for the captain.”

Physical contact was the key. Magic — _real_ magic — was less the stuff of fairy tales and movies, less fire, water, wind, and earth than it was a connection to _being._ Magic was blood. Magic was flesh. Magic was the very light of a soul. It could be sensed through distances, but could not be controlled through the same. And so, when Jakob’s grip fell away, the officer’s senses returned to him, no longer muddled by forces beyond him. The most he’d suffered for the interaction was the idea that Jakob had shown him something meaningful. A badge, or ID, or something a real consultant-to-the-captain might have owned.

In reality, Jakob had shown him a handful of credit and health insurance cards. In reality, Jakob’s contact was involved in something on the side he could only desperately hope hadn’t chosen that night to surface. A top-secret investigation. Magic amplifying drugs. A conspiracy from within and without the Houses so well hidden that they could only begin to guess at the scale. But if it wasn’t that…

The magic was wrong. Jakob needed answers.

“Right. Sorry. I didn’t recognize you,” said the officer. He shook his head as if blinking himself out of a daydream and moved aside.

No more than three steps further, Jakob was caught by someone else. A kid, barely thirty, puffing out his chest like keeping Jakob away was his new and only goal in life. Waiting seemed a better choice than trying to disappear into a crowd that only existed on the other side of the barrier, so Jakob slowed to a stop in the center of the street and put on the friendliest face he could manage. He didn’t smile, but he did stop scowling.

The new someone was apparently a detective, and one set on emulating some strange combination of _loose-cannon rookie_ from every buddy cop story through history at that. The ways his youth had him fall short made him appear more like a noisy little breed of dog. A chihuahua. A pug. He was a baby in the shape of a man.

“I’m looking for the captain,” Jakob said almost pleasantly.

The baby-faced maybe-detective raised a hand in refusal, and Jakob hardly had time to think _ah, he’s one of those,_ before he whined at once petulant and two notches too deep, “Sir, you can’t be here. You need to come with me.”

Jakob didn’t move. He raised both hands, half to poke fun and half in surrender — this time he did smile — and took a step closer. It stopped the baby-man in his tracks.

“We’re old buddies,” Jakob said. “I do consulting work from time to time.”

“We don’t _need_ consultants,” the man shaped boy nearly cried. He shook his arms like he was being punished for bad behavior, and when he realized what he had done, made an even bigger show of collecting himself. “What I mean, _sir,_ is that this situation is under control. If we _need_ you, we’ll _call_ you.”

Jakob took another step closer. One more, and he could reach. One more, and he could touch.

“Oh, I’m sure we can work something out,” he said, letting his smile crack wider. Another step.

Closer to the front door of the home Jakob was there to see, the woman in the green blouse made some sort of half-aborted entirely too-anxious noise and took off in their direction at a jog.

“Jakob!” she said cheerfully, slapping a palm hard between his shoulder blades before stepping in line with the boy detective. “I see you’ve met my new babysitting project.”

Stephanie Black. Decorated police captain. The sort with a track record that meant back when she was a detective, she was called in _everywhere_ to help with _everything._ The reason — the _real_ reason — being that privately, she was a Black House magician. A keeper of the past. She was heir to the House, and its leader in every way that mattered with her father’s growing absence. Which meant she investigated. Black House magicians were police just as much as they were organized crime. They were the above and below. They posed the questions that Amber House solved.

In their thirties, that proximity grew them into something like siblings. In their forties, Jakob came to learn she wasn’t involved in House business by choice. She’d been a drama club kid growing up, and she was going to school for some complicated tech degree. She liked board games. She was, to everyone that mattered to her, Steph Gingrich, not Stephanie Black. Her mother’s maiden name, she’d explained; her death — Steph had been barely twenty at the time — meant there was nothing left to keep her father from hunting her down and forcing her into the work. _Of the family, not the House._

The puppy-boy very suddenly cleared his throat. “Ma’am, I was just —”

“You were punching above your weight class is what you were doing,” Steph said, only mildly unamused. “I told you to talk to the neighbors until I get a chance to catch up Murton. You still have work to do, now stop posturing and go do it.”

The large baby stubbornly puffed out his cheeks and snorted. He didn’t move.

“Go on,” Steph said, waving her hands to shoo him away. She waited and watched long enough that he was completely out of earshot before she turned her eyes back on Jakob.

“Your new detective is an infant,” he said.

“You think everyone under forty is a child,” said Steph, smiling. She’d picked up more wrinkles around the eyes in the short weeks since they’d last seen each other. Her auburn hair seemed another step closer to grey. Things must have been bad. Worse. “But I know what you mean. He’s not…”

“He’s ordinary.”

“Bingo. It’s why I haven’t stuck him with anyone yet. He’s got potential, but there’s always a lot of stupid to sand off the edges with the ones who don’t know about magic.”

Jakob felt himself faintly matching her smile.

“I expected you sooner,” Steph said.

Almost faster than it came, his smile dropped away. Jakob grunted. He hated being right.

“Oh. Your girl was the third body,” Steph said under her breath, parsing the noise immediately. She folded her arms at her chest. “Someone showed up after the bulk of the damage was done and managed to escape before we got here. I figured it was the…Well, I’m sure you can feel it in the air. You’ll see in a bit. How’s she holding up?”

Jakob grunted again and looked off into the distance, somewhere toward the empty space of the next lawn over.

“That bad, huh?”

“Mhm.”

Respect, or maybe pity, or maybe both stretched the silence on for another few seconds before Steph finally said, “It’s good she’s safe. Things are an absolute mess over here.”

Things inside the house were, in fact, a mess. The crisp ozone taste of _wrong_ was even stronger inside. The furniture was broken to pieces. The walls were full of holes, the entire kitchen sink had been knocked clean across the room, and nearly everything, broken or otherwise, wore some trace of blood.

They weren’t looking at a murder, they were looking at a message. That said, they also weren’t looking at all of it. Steph mentioned three bodies. Jakob was looking at one.

The first missing body had evidently been curled up in the far corner of the kitchen after trailing a mess away from the bulk of of it. Chloe. The second was more distinctly an issue. It had lost entirely too much blood, and yet, according to the footprints leading out the front door, simply rose and walked away. The third, the only one still there…Chloe never did get along with her mother. Jakob snorted out a burst of air. He hated being right.

“Told you,” said Steph with the same cadence as someone who had won a bet. She nodded toward a bloodied hand print on the overturned dining table. “Come here. Half my crime scene up and vanishing isn’t even the worst of it.”

Jakob groaned to himself and followed. When they were both sure no one was watching, Steph took a too-deep breath and placed the back of a knuckle to an edge of the smeared print. With her other hand, she braced herself against Jakob’s elbow. In that instant she was done, exhaling as her hands fell safely back to her sides and her eyes turned to him.

The instant, however, stretched out for an eternity. It began with a spark at Jakob’s arm and built slowly to a roar, every muscle in his body tensing over seconds drawn into days, weeks, and months until they were burning to ash within a flash of searing heat. A wave of cold sweat and weak limbs shot through him from head to toe and back again, dousing the sensation and leaving nothing but a throbbing headache and the unsettling feeling that he might need to find somewhere to empty his stomach for the next few minutes.

Memory magic. Black House’s specialty. Jakob hated it. Steph liked to describe it as astral projecting into the past. Maybe, to her, it really did feel that way. Jakob never quite saw it the same. Each secondhand spell felt more to him like living through hours in seconds and being flooded with nausea over the impossible discrepancy in time.

“You good?” Steph asked. She sounded miles away. Her hand brushed his elbow again. “I still have your meds in my car if you need them.”

Jakob tried to swallow, but his throat felt thick with the aftermath of seeing whatever he had seen, and he couldn’t quite manage anything but to choke. “Give me a second.”

She gave him a second. Impossible shapes and impossible light filled his mind, flashing over and over again like a rapid-fire slide show he couldn’t shut off. He couldn’t make sense of it. But he could walk.

“Okay,” Jakob said, and wiped a hand down his face. His palm came away damp with sweat. “Pills.”

~*~

When the final stray details of what he’d seen clicked into place, Jakob was slumped against the side of Steph’s car and in the middle of swallowing down a second fistful of pills. They only barely helped. The realization he had less than seconds later made it worse.

The stepfather’s eyes were glowing. The stepfather who could not use magic — who did not know about magic — was being led around like a puppet. And yet…The magician using him was nowhere in sight. There was no contact. No connection. No evidence a magician had been near the house at all beyond that overwhelming sickly residue. It was the exact sort of horror show Steph’s investigation aimed to stop. And it hadn’t.

“Son of a bitch,” Jakob whispered under his breath.

“You saw the eyes?”

“Yes.” Jakob inhaled slow and pushed himself away from the car. “Fuck.”

“Mhm,” Steph said.

“ _Fuck._ ”

Steph huffed out something like a laugh. “I know you don’t want to hear this, but we have to start looking into witches. There are too many reasons for them to have hurt this family.”

“Are you sure it’s them?”

“No, of course not. Don’t be an idiot. But as it stands, glowing eyes point us in one very specific direction. We have files and documents detailing the extracurricular magic House magicians use. What we _don't_ have is anything remotely close to that for witches. They are, whether you like it or not, our biggest suspect pool.”

Jakob sighed. She was right. When Steph first put together her team, none of the evidence pointed to the Houses. And yet it had, all the same. “The Houses —”

“We can — and for the record, I very much do — suspect House involvement all we want, but that means nothing without proof. One of your girls was targeted here, Jakob. Worry about that for now. You can’t keep her safe by trying to think ten steps ahead of the evidence we don’t have,” Steph said.

“No,” Jakob said, too deep in his own thoughts to address what was probably a valid point. There was something important hidden in those memories. Something he needed desperately to find, because _safe_ didn’t exist without answers. “No, this is a distraction. Someone wants us looking in the wrong direction.”

“Maybe. But people were still hurt in this distraction.”

Jakob made a small frustrated sound in the back of his throat.

“Yeah,” said Steph, pursing her lips like the sound had been words. “Talk to me. You’re more upset than usual.”

It was a little trick she had that somehow worked even though Jakob knew how to spot it a mile away. Steph would say something even further off the trail like she was doubling back to herd him in the right direction.

“I don’t know yet. I can’t promise she’ll be safe if we’re stuck looking the wrong way.” He paused, thoughts making one last ditch effort to escape. “Whoever is behind this is an idiot.”

“Well, then we got outplayed by an idiot, because _I_ certainly didn’t see this coming.” For a moment, Steph looked back toward the house. A sigh bubbled out of her throat. “Look, those reasons I mentioned? I can handle them on my own. You worry about your kids.”

Jakob grunted.

“Okay then. Now, before I get started, I need you to answer me honestly. Are you absolutely sure the Price girl hasn’t gotten involved in something? You mentioned she’s been close to magic before.”

“Who hasn’t?”

“Don’t,” Steph said firmly. “Answer my question.”

“I’m sure.” Obviously. He put in the work. Chloe Price wasn’t aware of magic. She had no associations with House magicians other than Rachel, and even less with the local covens. She was harmless. If someone was coming for her, she was not the end goal, she was a way to reach the Houses. Or someone _in_ the Houses. If someone was directing their attention _away,_ it was to distract long enough to keep their end goal a secret. But they went too loud. Too big. They announced themselves with the first move, and…No. There was something missing. Something he still couldn’t see. “She’s stupid, but she’s not an idiot.”

He was sure of it. Except that he wasn’t, anymore. The silence stretched for long and then longer before Steph gave up the fight. She stared deep into Jakob’s eyes, blinked herself out, and threw her hands exhaustedly into the air.

“Okay,” she said. “Okay, fine. It’s just, the alternative isn’t exactly more comforting. If this was her tonight, we could _help_ her.”

Jakob blinked slowly.

“How about this?” she asked. “Knowing you, you’re planning to go check out whatever place those two have for themselves, right?”

Jakob blinked slower. He was. He needed to know it was safe. Not that anything would protect against the sort of magic they were looking at. The most he could do was make sure it was safe from the rest.

“Don’t give me that look. They’re two twenty-somethings in a relationship, and one of them has House money to play with. _Obviously_ they’ve got something.”

Again, Jakob blinked. He pulled in a slow, slow breath.

“I believe she’s innocent if you’re the one telling me, but here’s where we’re at,” Steph said. “Someone targeted her family for a reason, and _she’s like a daughter to a man who’s like a brother to me,_ isn’t the kind of thing I can bring to my father. A family of ordinaries was hurt, he’ll want a real answer. Search her place, confirm little Rachel is the only magic in her life, and you’ll give me enough to work with.”

“Hmm.”

“I need _something,_ because otherwise we’re stuck dealing with distractions,” she said. “We need to get through the first layer before we can move onto the next. We need to put in the work.”

The irony of needing to be reminded as much wasn’t lost on Jakob, even if he couldn’t quite bring himself to be bothered. Only two people on earth managed to make him so consistently useless. One of them was hurt.

“When that’s done…” Steph trailed off and rolled her head against the window of her car. “For what it’s worth, I don’t believe witches are the real problem here, either. They’re involved. We’ve known that from the start. But we need to do the work.”

“Mmh.”

Steph smiled lightly. “I know you’re attached to those girls, but this can’t be the thing that gets you, okay? Tonight is the beginning of something, not the end. I need you with me for the rest of it.”

Jakob exhaled quietly. She was right. Whatever they were seeing was worse than things had ever been before. It was never going to disappear quietly just because they tried to do the work quietly. Too much was changing too quickly. There wasn’t anything left to say.

“Take care of yourself, Steph,” he said, and left.

She frowned a little at that, but didn’t make any effort to stop him. “You too, old man.”

Back in the silence of his car, Jakob thought. Not about solutions, but about his next step. Rachel deserved to know what happened. The boss, too. It involved his daughter. His House. An itch in the back of his throat kept him from picking up his phone and notifying either.

It could have been the work of a genius. It could have been the work of an idiot. It could have been both. Two plans butting heads and hurting innocents in the process. It could have been too many things. He would be caught in that loop for an eternity before he found the answer. Which meant telling Rachel anything would do more harm than good.

Telling the boss…Another missing piece. Another _why_ without an answer. Even if James Amber wasn’t involved, not even Jakob trusted him, lately.

With a weary sigh, Jakob pulled his car into the street and drove. There was work to do.

At the first red light, he reached for his phone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> mystery begin
> 
> thanks to everyone leaving kudos! and everyone commenting! i love hearing from you all


	4. Rachel

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I mean, it almost was. For like a day there,” Chloe said. A grin, something real, and something that might have politely been described as shit eating cracked very suddenly at her lips. “Priceless magic,” she said. “For a priceless girl.”
> 
> “Get out. I hate you,” Rachel said, but she said it smiling.

“She’s family.”

“She’s also very stupid. Don’t leave her alone for too long.”

As if she needed the reminder. Rachel grit out a smile as best she could before slamming the door in Jakob’s face.

Her forehead dropped against its cool metal surface, arms dangling uselessly at her sides. She took a trembling breath and fought to collect herself. She was useless as she was. _Chloe_ was the strong one. Rachel could act her way through it with the best of them, put on a mask of bravery capable of fooling anyone who never thought to look too closely, but it never meant a thing around her. It never had. It never would.

But. For the moment, acting was all she had. There wasn’t anything left but to try.

“Game face. C’mon,” she said under her breath, and slapped twice at the sides of her head.

In the bathroom, Chloe was still perched on the marble sink countertop where she’d left her. She looked starkly out of place, all that lithe muscle and relentless energy ground down to the worthlessness of a shattered bloody mess. The air was thick with the scent of copper. Wealth surrounded her like a halo. Magic surrounded her like something more. Fixtures made of priceless metals and stones spread across the starless black night of the walls, framing her like some ridiculous parody of a renaissance painting. Ghosts praying for the safety of their beloved stranger. The floors — always shifting, always changing — seemed to come alive with concern for her.

When they first found her, when Jakob said they were bringing Chloe to the hotel, Rachel had stayed quiet. Amber House, like every other place the Houses called home, was a mixture of human construct and _old_ magic. The kind that sounded more like some children’s bedtime story than reality. The kind lost to time centuries ago. The kind that her father, and her grandfather, and her grandfather’s father went on and on and _on_ about like things were so much better in the days when magic was more than what it became.

The Houses were alive, hidden from all who didn’t think to see them. They existed and didn’t. They were permanently impermanent labyrinths that tore themselves down and built themselves up for the sake of those who had earned their approval. One day they were something, the next, something else.

And so when they first found her, when she first learned where Jakob planned to take them, Rachel stayed quiet. Chloe might not have been welcome in the eyes of their House, and speaking up wouldn’t have changed a thing. The reality, the truth, was more than she could ever have hoped for. Amber House ushered them in like Chloe had always belonged and was simply returning home once more. It guided them to safety as if her wellbeing was its only concern in the world. Rachel stayed quiet. She was speechless. Even Jakob, underneath that patina of gruffness and grump, seemed genuinely shocked by the care it gave. Not once in her lifetime. Not once in _his._

Rachel cleared her throat. She tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear and rapped her knuckles lightly against the door, announcing herself.

“Hey,” she breathed, almost too softly to hear.

Though Chloe didn’t answer, she did meet Rachel’s eyes with a faint twitch of a smile. Small steps. Closing the distance to settle between her legs pulled a similar response: Chloe smiled like she thought it was the right thing to do, and so, carefully, slowly, Rachel dragged the pads of her fingers up Chloe’s body. She moved from knees, to thighs, to hips, and further, acting like they were anywhere else. Like they were anybody else doing anything easier.

“Are you up for a shower?” Rachel asked through her mask of bravery, one hand scratching at the back of Chloe’s neck, the other sliding down to toy with the button of her jeans. “You’re getting naked for me either way, but I’m nothing if not a gracious host.”

Chloe’s eyes fell shut with a raspy moan. She still didn’t seem to recognize her, still seemed stuck on reacting in guesses.

So, pulling her hands slowly away, Rachel pressed the tips of her fingers light along the line of Chloe’s jaw. “That sounds like a yes to me, Priceless.”

The small huff of air that slipped past Chloe’s lips almost, _almost_ felt like the old her, and before she could think better of the idea, Rachel kissed her just a bit too hard and just a bit too long, pulling them both down toward breathless, darkened depths. She kept on, nipping at each of Chloe’s little gasps and noises, leading her one way and another — tongue, and teeth, and the breathless whispers of laughter — until Chloe’s hands found unsteady purchase in her hair. Her fingers flexed occasionally, rough skin digging in like a fight between comfort and the unsafety of finally allowing herself to know.

After a short bit of wrestling with clothes and enough touching, looking, and grinning to feel like they’d somehow traveled through time to end up the same pair of awkward, lanky teenagers they were the first time they’d ever seen each other naked, Rachel led Chloe by the hand into the shower. It was spacious; bigger than anything Rachel ever had or ever would need. A porcelain monstrosity with too many showerheads lining the walls in columns. Chloe was a multicolored ink splash against it all. Roses and rain. Magic and not.

Rachel turned the water as hot as it went. Enough to burn away the blood and the memories both. She set herself to work taking care of what the water wouldn’t fast enough, its searing heat and steady white-noise rhythm their only company. She lathered a washcloth and stepped closer, craning her neck to meet Chloe’s gaze.

Something intangible, indescribable urged her to reach for Chloe’s mind. She didn’t know how. She didn’t know why. But it didn’t stop. _Reach out,_ it whispered in unknowable shapes like the beat of her heart, _reach out, reach out, reach out._

And she did, though not as the drum of thought demanded. She lifted Chloe’s left arm and began gently scrubbing away. A particularly stubborn mark at the wrist held her entranced for long enough to fade beneath the surface of movement and care.

 _Reach out,_ her thoughts continued, restless clouds of emotion blown away by still more. Fragments of their last night together flowed through the gaps like the steady rising steam.

Rachel knew of time magic. White and Black houses; incredibly complex rituals to see into the future sold off to the highest bigger. Significantly less complex — though no less difficult — methods to see into the past. Whatever sort of mess Red House found themselves in at any given point in time. _Sight. Equilibrium._ Whatever that meant. What she’d felt with Chloe…It wasn’t that. Time magic as the Houses knew it didn’t allow magicians to experience someone’s thoughts along with them, to feel the things they felt, as they felt them, and to do the same in return. It didn’t allow people to lose themselves so thoroughly in the sensation of shared minds and bodies that the experience seared itself into the backs of their eyes and the walls of their minds nearly before they began.

There were stories, fairy tales really, ones hidden away and that Rachel shouldn’t have known — but no one knew she knew them in the first place to be hurt by that fact — about magicians who lived during the time of old magic. About magicians who became _bonded_ like the happily ever after of a children’s bedtime story placed instead at the beginning. It was a link beyond comprehension to those who hadn’t felt it. An impossible sharing of the mind, of the heart, of the self.

For years, they had been just that: stories, lost and collecting dust in the back of an office, in the back of her thoughts. Being in Chloe’s bed, in Chloe’s heart, in Chloe’s dreams, in _Chloe —_ in every sense of what that meant — sent them all roiling back to the surface.

It couldn’t possibly have been related, but Rachel smiled bitterly to herself all the same as she wiped away the dirt and the blood from Chloe’s body. She moved carefully, tenderly, thriving on every little hint of pleasure in Chloe’s voice, in the scrape of calloused hands as they sought out her shoulders for balance, and in the steady building heat in her eyes. She worked. And she doused herself in the impossible possibility that it _might_ have been.

 _Happily ever after._ Fate worked in strange ways. Fate was kind of an asshole.

 _Reach out,_ pulsed through her again. It was the shape, the sensation, the taste of desire, and Rachel didn’t know how to fight it. Maybe she didn’t want to. She swallowed slowly, discarded the bloodstained cloth to the floor, and she stood. The water flowed red around them. She lifted a hand hesitantly toward Chloe’s cheek, not trusting herself to speak.

 _Reach out,_ came the thought again. She wanted to. Chloe nodded.

She reached out. Cautiously, at first. Chloe’s mind opened to her just like it had the first time she tried, when she was too preoccupied with the euphoric shock of realization over what she was feeling for much more than surface level teasing and comfort; for much more than the barest glimpse into Chloe’s consciousness. She’d slipped for a moment that night, just barely and just enough to feel their thoughts begin to bleed together. When it happened, her heart sank with fear over how _easy_ it had been to disappear, and she tore herself back to herself under the blurry haze of afterglow.

Staying under would have been simple, but _too_ simple. She chose instead to hover at the edges, cautiously dipping in and out, smoothing over nightmares like a lazy flow of emotion tracing over the tide.

It was too easy that night, and it was too easy now. Too familiar, too endless, too tempting. Rachel sank in like an anchor through water. She drifted further and further until everything Chloe felt and thought crashed over her in waves heavy enough to leave her drowning in a kaleidoscope of shared sensation, desperate for air. Chloe was hurt, but it was more than that. There were walls, but it was more than that. It felt like every sort of pain Chloe had ever experienced running free and unrestrained between them. An accidental smokescreen taking form and digging at her chest like the tip of a knife until pulling back felt almost impossible.

Rachel’s eyes shot open. They were glowing again, though she didn’t know why; she could see herself — green, almost gold — reflected in the endless blue of Chloe’s. Neither spoke, only shuddered, a thought like fear crystallizing between them.

Suddenly, Chloe went still, tearing herself free from the link. Rachel blinked, disoriented and off balance with the violence of it, and Chloe’s hand was at her throat before she could adjust. Chloe’s hand was slamming her against the far wall of the shower with enough force to rattle her eyes in her skull and too much strength to fight. Her back was digging into a column of searing hot showerheads. She couldn’t breathe. She didn’t try. She didn’t fight. Because she was sure: magic was the reason Chloe was hurt.

Chloe’s grip on her throat tightened. She looked terrified. Furious. Unsure and unsteady. She was a trapped animal fighting for survival. Rachel didn’t so much as flinch. She met Chloe’s gaze confidently, feeling as every knuckle of every finger bruised further into her throat.

The walls of her lungs were slowly lighting themselves on fire, and still, she didn’t fight. She lifted her hands as slow as she could manage, palms settling at Chloe’s jaw, thumbs stroking slowly back and slower forth. She smiled and the grip tightened again, nails digging half-moon scars into flesh.

“Chloe,” Rachel husked, smiling wider, smiling real and bright. Her vision faded black at the edges. Tendrils of darkness threatening to steal consciousness completely. Her thoughts blinked out for steady growing moments. The room was too bright. The room was too dark. Her chest felt like a fist fighting to clench. Chloe’s grip tightened once again. The barest movement and Rachel’s thumbs brushed Chloe’s lips.

She reached out.

Chloe lurched away with the same abrupt violence as before, collapsing in a heap on the opposite end of the shower. The change left Rachel barely enough strength to stay standing, to cough, and choke, and wheeze the air back into her lungs. Her throat was throbbing like it wanted nothing more than to escape the bruise slowly forming around it. She felt seconds from blacking out with every drop of water that touched the tender skin at her spine, but she stayed standing. She found the strength, and she stayed standing.

In every one of those old stories about older magic, the bonded were viewed as heroes. Saviors. _Chosen,_ some called them. The Houses _still_ talked like that, even if the word itself vanished somewhere along the way. They couched it in paragraphs and essays of distraction like the cultish message, _Only be led by the deserving,_ wasn’t still front and center in the end. Like they thought someone might come along and fix all their problems if they just placed enough value on blood. Rachel hacked out one last cough. _Happily ever after._ Fate really was an asshole.

In the far corner, Chloe sat, barely still propped up. She didn’t raise her head. The next breath Rachel took seemed ready to tear her apart from the inside out, but she moved, slowly, methodically, one limb at a time, to cross the distance. Her legs nearly gave out, but she pushed through.

Neither said a word, caught again in the pressure of quiet and the steady song of water raining down on them both. Strands of thick blue hair faded pink and dark blonde at the roots clung to the back of Chloe’s neck. Rachel’s breath came slow and stuttering, and her vision faded momentarily out and then back.

She pressed two fingers to the sore skin at her throat, and numbness shot through her body like a static spark. Once more, her vision went blurry, hazy, and she was back, suddenly, with Frank. Frank, who she never should have given the time of day, but who she had because he’d smiled and asked what was wrong like he saw right through her. Like it wasn’t his entire job to sell to girls like her. He’d taken nearly all of her in the end, and she almost let him, because sometimes, when the air in his apartment was nothing but smoke and she was too numb to think, or to talk, or to feel, his voice was like curling up next to a roaring fire.

Lucky, then, that she slipped sooner than later. That Jakob saw her — back when he was only her father’s right-hand man and she was only the daughter of the boss — and realized what was happening. By the time he’d finished, nothing and no one was left alive. They never told a soul.

Lucky, too, that she met Chloe. Because where Jakob cared more like a father than her actual father, Chloe _loved_ strong enough that the false image of it she’d grown to know felt like nothing more than a distant memory. If only the pain at her throat didn’t remind so deeply. Chloe wasn’t him, even if that pulsing hurt was.

Someone shuddered then, and Rachel’s world came back into focus, distraction vanishing somewhere in the steam. She was combing fingers through Chloe’s hair, and evidently had been for some time. Their eyes were locked together and a pulse beat furiously at Chloe’s temples, but the rest of her was calm. The rest of her was still.

At the look in Chloe’s eyes, Rachel’s fear vanished too, leaving nothing but empty hurt and waking nightmares. She flexed her fingers lightly over Chloe’s scalp and knelt into the freely given space between her legs. Recognition shined — finally — behind Chloe’s eyes, half-lidded as she hid beneath eyelashes. Recognition shined in every droplet of water following the curve of her fearful, apologetic smile.

“Rach, I —” Chloe tried. But Rachel’s lips were on hers before she could voice another word.

~*~

Rachel tightened an arm around Chloe’s waist, lips pressed to the base of her neck. Her grip tightened, tangled in the hem of the shirt Chloe had on, and the rumble of responding laughter served to ease her limbs more thoroughly than she knew she needed.

“Do you want to talk about it?” she asked, pressing one, two, and three kisses down into the dip of Chloe’s shoulder.

It was a tattered old thing, the shirt Chloe was wearing. When they were still seventeen and eighteen, Rachel stole it like she had a million others before disappearing in the middle of the night. She’d been using it as a pillowcase every day since then. The smile Chloe gave when she saw it — teeth bared, eyes crinkled at the corners, and the smallest little laugh saying _I caught you_ — was enough to light up the room. She was grinning just like she had the first time Rachel agreed to sleep with her. Like she had the first morning they woke up together. Like the first time Rachel realized they’d built an entire history of firsts.

After what they had just been through, it was too much normal, too soon. But the little things always made Chloe happy; she was at her brightest given chances to know things, and her. So, Rachel let her have it back under the guise of keeping her warm. They both knew, after all, that the only reason she wanted it was for the chance to make it hers again before losing it to the bed like it had never been anywhere else.

Chloe breathed deep and tilted her head back. The neon lights of the skyline shone through the windows to tint her skin like watercolor. “Yeah, just…”

Rachel tugged the blankets higher. Up to her shoulders. Halfway up Chloe’s ribs. Some stubborn attempt to keep more of Chloe for herself, to hide her from the light. Neither spoke for the beat of long breaths.

“We don’t have to,” Rachel said.

“I want to,” Chloe said, shaking her head. “It’s just…”

Rachel held her lips against Chloe’s neck. Her breath ghosted warmth over skin before fading into the night. “Okay.”

Comfortable silence spread through the moment, leaving them adrift with nothing but steady heartbeats and the constant of breathing. The casual intimacy of years.

The peace of those moments sometimes made Rachel feel guilty for lingering in touch like she did. Her hands scratching light and lazy at Chloe’s waist. Her cheek resting comfortably at Chloe’s shoulder. Her skin on Chloe’s. She’d spent half her life wearing contact like armor, half her life rehearsing touch to the thoughtless, impersonal ease of perfection, and yet somehow, even from the first day they met, it was different with Chloe.

Because Chloe laughed at the first sign of flirting, just like she relaxed down to the bones every time it happened now, and all the passing years had done was give those reactions strength to fill Rachel’s heart more and more with every new day; enough that seeing her shine felt like learning the language of truth for the second first time. Every day with Chloe was like learning to _mean_ things again, but the past never disappeared so easily.

Something shifted in the quiet. Chloe inhaled. Chloe exhaled. And she explained: she had gone back to her parents’ house because Joyce called, worried, or excited. She couldn’t remember which, anymore. She hadn’t made it over until after. Joyce was already gone. David wasn’t. There was blood everywhere.

Worse, David had opened his eyes, irises glowing bright, and though he was barely half-alive and stuck to the floor by a knife in his leg, he saw her and raised a hand, and suddenly Chloe was skidding back into the kitchen like being shot out the barrel of a gun. The impact shattered wood, cracked tile, and crushed the air from her lungs. The rest was a blur. She remembered the knife to an almost bizarre level of detail. It was apparently something she’d given to Joyce as a gift for her fiftieth birthday; Damascus steel, a hand carved wooden handle, and months’ worth of saving, all to see it retired inside a man’s thigh. She remembered running, and running, and running.

Rachel reached for Chloe’s shoulder, brushing her lips over the shell of her ear.

“Hey,” she said, knowing that she had already made the decision. Chloe deserved to know. Chloe deserved the choice.

Chloe shifted, grunting and groaning as she rolled onto her back, one arm wriggling its way slowly underneath Rachel’s pillow. An invitation. One Rachel couldn’t accept until after Chloe knew.

“What’s up?” Chloe asked with a too-easy smirk. There were cracks on the edges, and through them, Rachel glimpsed the strain to avoid seeing her throat.

Rachel swallowed, searching for the words. “There’s something I need to tell you.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Chloe said instantly.

Rachel froze, heart perched to drop.

“That…Came out wrong,” Chloe said, her voice growing rough with too many things. She was trying too hard, putting on a brave face for Rachel’s sake, despite that it should have been the other way around. Chloe rose to her elbows, pressing her lips to the bridge of Rachel’s nose and nuzzling gently in. “It matters. A lot. Like, frankly, I’d give my left fuckin’ tit for some idea of what’s going on, but c’mon, dude. You’ve never owed me anything, least of all answers to shit I didn’t ask.”

At a loss, Rachel held her tongue. She opened her mouth, then closed it.

“If you want, I _guess,_ you can still tell me,” said Chloe, pulling back with a smile.

Rachel said nothing.

“Oh, but, let me take a crack at guessing first,” Chloe went on. “You’re about to tell me, drum roll please…Magic is real.”

Again, Rachel said nothing. She stared, mouth held open in something that might have been surprise and might have been something else entirely.

Chloe pumped her fist, baring her teeth in another wide, toothy smile. “Got it in one!”

“I really hate you sometimes,” Rachel whispered breathlessly, before she realized she’d spoken.

“You love me,” Chloe said easily, dragging the both of them back down into bed until they were lying on their sides, face to face and close enough to taste.

“That remains to be seen.” Rachel said.

“You do. It’s okay. Don’t worry. I know.”

“ _Anyway,_ ” Rachel said, biting back a smirk of her own. “It — that was only part of what I wanted to tell you.”

“Oh?”

“You…You really knew already?”

“I mean, at a certain point you gotta think it’d be weirder if I didn’t.”

Rachel nodded solemnly and reached for Chloe’s chest, hovering just before contact. She sought out an answer in her eyes, hoping and hoping until Chloe grabbed her by the wrist and slapped the hand flat against her.

An inhale, an exhale, a relieved shudder of a laugh finally breaking free, and Rachel reached, and reached, and reached until she felt Chloe’s heart beating in time with her own. She slowed them both to the other side of tension, warming Chloe from the inside out, relaxation like a current racing to flood her veins until her eyes were dropping closed and she was moaning satisfaction into the space between them. That — hearts, and touch, and _life —_ was the magic she knew; the magic she had known for years before meeting Chloe and feeling the true extent of sensation. It was hers. It was home.

“This part,” Rachel said, pulling her hand away to cup Chloe’s cheek. “This part is just for you. I wanted it to be something special.”

“I mean, it almost was. For like a day there,” Chloe said. A grin, something _real_ , and something that might have politely been described as shit eating cracked very suddenly at her lips. “Priceless magic,” she said. “For a priceless girl.”

“Get out. I hate you,” Rachel said, but she said it smiling.

“My notes say otherwise, actually. I keep notes.”

Chloe kissed her then, the faintest little press of lips like that was that, and that was inarguably the end of it. And it could have easily been. When she pulled away, Rachel reached again for her heart and her nerves until she seemed ready to drift off under the touch of her magic. She watched on in silence, clearing away Chloe’s stress like she had everything else. Seconds turned to minutes, and finally, finally, Chloe met her eyes again, unbridled joy shining like the moon.

“Unfortunately,” Rachel whispered, her lips grazing Chloe’s. “I think your notes are right. I might love you.”

Chloe leaned in again. She tasted like pure white light. “I see,” she said thoughtfully. “That _is_ unfortunate. We’ll have to do something about it. Extensive experiments.”

Rachel could have cracked a joke. She reached further instead, past what she knew, past what was hers, vanishing beneath the ocean blue surface of Chloe’s eyes in that peaceful, perfect after. She felt herself fading away, dissolving into the motion like one and one ceasing to be two. For a moment, Chloe gasped and tensed — and Rachel knew her own eyes must have been glowing, because what else but that could stir Chloe’s mind up into restless currents — but after one breath and another, after taking in the reality of their situation, she calmed, mind, body, and all. She even smiled, awestruck, reaching for the line of Rachel’s jaw and pawing at her cheek like she was no longer entirely sure how to inhabit her own body with so much of herself shared between them, and their realm of shared thought filled with warmth even as Rachel eased them first back to each other and then back to reality.

“Holy shit,” Chloe said, half-laughing an exhale.

Rachel nodded lightly. “Yeah.”

“So…Like,” Chloe said, swallowing deeply. “ _Magic._ Is there, like, okay, back up a second, are we talking, like, Narnia? Is there a whole magic world?”

“Chloe.”

“Harry Potter bullshit? Or, no, we went to the same shitty art school, there’s no way; what else is —”

“Chloe. Can I talk?” asked Rachel.

“Yes ma’am.”

“Harry Potter is a kid’s book,” Rachel said, and paused. “Though, I’m pretty sure my dad wants to use magic to take over the world.”

“Ah,” Chloe chuckled. “Supervillain type shit. Off by one.”

“Turns out your girlfriend is one of those after all.”

Chloe gasped, full of mock offense. “I can’t believe I’ve been the victim of a long con all this time! And here I thought you wanted to run away together because you loved me.”

“Maybe,” Rachel said, and shrugged. “Probably.”

“Downgraded to a probably, and yet I love you anyway. How incredibly brave and sexy of me.” Chloe said.

Rachel slapped her lightly on the chest. “I bet you tell all the girls you choke out in the shower that you love them.”

It was, she knew even before guilt flashed behind Chloe’s eyes, the wrong thing to say. Chloe looked suddenly off to her left, the way she always did when she was ready to move on but didn’t have the strength to say as much. The expression was only barely there and gone in a blink, buried beneath the pressure of the moment they’d spent so long nurturing to life.

It was a mistake. One destined to resurface some other time, some other place, along with who knew how many more of their countless others. Another problem for another day. The little ones were always like that; too many and things started changing. Things changed and they didn’t change back.

“Not very often,” Chloe said, carefully upbeat in a way that meant she knew Rachel saw everything and wished more than anything she hadn’t. “Not when you’re around.”

“Good,” Rachel breathed, not quite relieved.

It was hardly the smartest thing to continue joking about, but they were nothing if not famously terrible at self-restraint. Those times were the hardest. Those times were the ones where Rachel started wondering whether maybe Chloe was only with her out of a mutual fear of loneliness. The big mistakes were always like that. Too many and the self-doubt crept back in.

Only, then Chloe would crack a smile and say _I love you,_ and it got easier to believe what they had was real, rather than some convenient bit of proximity.

There was a simple solution, far easier than waiting for Chloe to say those magic words or to look at her just right: to use that unfamiliar magic until they grew lost together in a tangle of self so deeply and irreversibly that the only way out was to destroy themselves for the chance to be reshaped in their return.

There was, too, a simpler solution. To talk.

Rachel did neither, simply pulled herself closer and held Chloe tighter, burying her face in the crook of her neck.

“Hey,” Chloe said in the very same moment, scraping up against broken. “Do you think we’re trying too hard?”

Rachel didn’t answer. She didn’t move.

“To get back to normal, I mean. This is all…”

“A lot,” Rachel answered, nearly too-muffled against Chloe’s skin.

After long enough that the thread of conversation was almost lost, Chloe said, “Yeah.”

Rachel shrugged. “Maybe. You’re allowed to joke if you want to.”

No followup came, and eventually Chloe wrapped arms tight around her. Content with the answer. Content that she still could. Before long, Rachel felt her nearing the end of her endurance. She didn’t say anything, but it came across in the beat of her heart and the way she slowed her breathing to match Rachel’s own like an unconscious take on counting sheep. Rachel took the arm draped over her side, drew it gently against her chest, and pressed her lips to the knuckles.

For a moment, Rachel thought she might have heard her phone. But then Chloe moved just barely closer, filling her mind and her body both with an unnatural warmth that sent all other thought fading into the night. The quiet intimacy of a perfect moment.

She slept.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this and the prologue were very very fun parts to plan out, i'm glad to finally have them both finished and posted


	5. Chloe

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “You and the girl are too old to still be acting like horny teenagers. That apartment was a disaster.”
> 
> “Nice try gramps, but we’re acting like horny adults these days.” Chloe offered all too easily, an offhand nothing in a conversation far past them. She hadn’t remembered leaving the apartment a mess, but then, her memories weren’t in the best place. She hadn’t remembered, but then, she’d been busy hurting herself and Rachel. There were worse reasons to forget.

Ahead, there stood a door.

A door attached to nothing and leading nowhere.

Chloe risked glancing behind her. The thing, the monster, watched her without moving. Shapeless shadow and ink black drippings swimming and swirling through forms barely beginning to brush against familiar. Sinew and limbs as endless as the dark, growing, and fading, and growing, and fading. It was waves in the form of her stepfather — step-douche, she’d barely had the energy to call him lately — rippled to nothing with a shudder. It was everyone who had ever hurt her. It was nothing at all. Chloe shut her eyes tight. She crossed the threshold.

“ _Chloe!_ ” a voice overwhelmed with laughter shouted as she passed through.

Every other sound was muffled, distant, one too many layers of fog between audibility and her. Other voices, older voices, were speaking in low tones somewhere nearby. Sounds of traffic some ways away were tuned down to nothing but feeling. The scent of smoke and fire hung thick in the air. It could have been a bonfire or a backyard grill. It could have been morning, afternoon, or evening. Chloe turned toward the voice. A girl with a blinding smile and hair that might have been long, or short, or anywhere in the between posed triumphantly, the image of victory at the top of an old plastic slide. They were dressed like a pirate and prouder than the devil, vibrant sea blue eyes shining stronger than stars.

Behind her, the monster growled its unnatural growl. As if it had always existed, always been there, impossibly crystal clear and reflecting off every surface at once. A shadow of shadows. A window to the dark.

Chloe stepped once toward the girl. The monster growled again, and Chloe moved further. As her heel touched the grass, an apartment sprang up around her. A stage play shifting scenes like ghosts rushing to see props in their proper place.

“Chlo,” another voice said, warmer, and rougher, and low, and for a moment — a fragile, broken moment — Chloe almost allowed herself the time to look. Behind her, the monster growled again, and Chloe took her next step before looking had the chance to become seeing.

“Chloe Price,” commanded yet another voice as she stepped into the parking lot of a school.

“Chloe.” The back office of the family diner.

“Chloe.” A grotesque maze of living, pulsing, endless halls; veins larger than bodies and a presence like the stars. Possibility reshaping itself by the second through nothing but the sheer force of nightmares forced to life.

Again, the monster growled, this time loud enough to rattle bone, and finally Chloe met its eyes, glowing bright enough to blind. Bright light emerging from everywhere and nowhere, inside and out of the impossible depths of dark as if they were the only two truths in the world. In a flash, the light went brighter and brighter, blinding, and further, and gone. The monster reached out like a question, a threat, like seeking out contact for reasons that turned the blood in Chloe’s veins rancid.

“Chloe,” called a stranger with a voice too warm to be real. They sounded like safety returning to fill an absence that Chloe had known for so long she’d nearly forgotten what it was to live in the before. Their voice was a death that never came along dragging loneliness behind. Chloe shut her eyes.

“ _Chlooo,_ ” someone grumbled against her chest.

Jolting awake from her nightmare, sweat soaked and out of breath with panic, the sensation of very real breath and very real words nearly sent Chloe screaming. Around her, the air was deathly still. Rachel was holding her too, too tight, nails digging into flesh deep enough to cut and one leg draped over her own at the thigh, wrapped back under at the knee. Vulnerability she never allowed while awake; the pride of someone who still thought dependency ran one way.

Chloe looked to her left. The same sprawling skyline from earlier in the night greeted her, newly tinted by a sky brushed pink, purple, and blue with the lightness of dawn. The same floor to ceiling window framed it all. They were nowhere. They were anywhere.

Chloe looked to her right. Rachel’s whole face was buried in her chest. She was drooling, she was snoring, and every now and again, her tongue darted out to wet her lips before she confided some completely indecipherable nothing into the quiet of the room. Familiar didn’t begin to describe it; they’d spent too many nights to count in nowhere hotels and motels across every last corner of anywhere. But it was wrong. The walls were swimming. The floors were shifting. They were inside the lines of an image offset just enough to unsettle. Chloe’s lungs were stone. Her limbs were lead.

Somehow, some way, she wrenched herself free, hoping it might crumple the building fear into some distant, dark corner of her mind.

It did not.

A shift of the sheets, a pillow in her place, and she was free. To feel suffocated by her dreams in peace, to sit on the edge of the bed and bury her face in her palms, to take time — just one small piece of time — and exist outside of panic and confusion. To hear the dull hum of city silence and the stuttering, gurgling snores of the most beautiful woman she had ever known some few feet away, and to breathe.

Wriggling her way back toward comfort became a fight for Rachel before long, every movement chased by the run-on shapes of complaints like _ChloecomebackorI’lldie_ mumbled and grumbled listlessly into pillows for lack of a pair of breasts. Every sound washed over her in waves.

Pulse finally steadied beneath the peace of it all, she risked a glance.

Rachel looked perfect. Rachel looked broken. The bruise at her throat had long since bloomed dark; purple so deep it seemed more endless than the impossible black of the walls before fading vibrant blue, blood red, and further at the edges. The trio of ringed burns along her spine were bubbling, cracking, staining the silk sheets slow in a too-vibrant pink. At the sight, Chloe’s breath caught painfully in her throat.

She shuddered and shot too fast to her feet, eyes searching desperately for anything else to see and landing immediately on the closet at the other end of the room. An anchor of mundanity in a place anything but. She crossed the distance without allowing herself a chance to think.

The room was endless, a void that extended forever and further, like falling through eternity. It was suffocating. It was too big. Too small. Too much. Chloe needed to go. She needed to leave. She needed air, and not even the realization on opening the heavy sliding closet doors that Rachel was hoarding nearly an entire wardrobe worth of clothes stolen from her over the years — and the following thought that it was _truly_ impressive she still owned anything at all in the face of so much consensual thievery — was enough to distract from that fact.

One pair of faded, discolored shoes and some shredded jeans later, and she was ready to leave.

Walls that weren’t walls shuddered like reassurance, and floors that weren’t floors danced a restless dance of granite and onyx for her. Patterns she couldn’t understand, straining her eyes like illusions set on becoming unseen. The lone metal door that Chloe could only hope was a way out opened blessedly quietly, and after turning once more to watch Rachel sleep, after lingering too long and pulling away guilty, Chloe stepped into the hall.

Lights hung in the air, suspended by nothing, held in place by no one, turning the endless empty of forever strangely golden with warmth. Only one guard was nearby, back turned and entirely oblivious until Chloe cleared her throat. He might have been new; he might have been a face Chloe never bothered to learn — he looked as easily forgettable as anyone else — and he definitely did not speak. He did, however, keep his eyes firmly on Chloe. Waiting, maybe. Expecting her to say something or else leave.

“So,” she said, grasping blindly at nothing and hoping to pull out a sentence. “Is the big guy here?”

The guard blinked and shook his head slowly.

“Am I, like,” Chloe tried and then didn’t, swallowing down the rest of the thought — _am I a prisoner,_ as if she wasn’t leaving Rachel’s bed, Rachel’s home, where Rachel lived, like they were perfectly normal girlfriends waking up after a perfectly normal night — and starting again. “Do I need to stay in the room?”

Once more, the guard shook his head.

Chloe cleared her throat as quietly as she could manage, relief flooding waves through her limbs, and she scratched gently at the back of her neck. “Cool. Cool, cool, cool, do you mind if I stretch my legs for a bit? Hella stuffy in there.”

The guard gestured down the hall and stepped back into place; a perfectly warm invitation to go get lost if she’d ever seen one. She started walking, and she didn’t look back.

~*~

Wandering was a truly bizarre experience. The place was a hotel, except that it wasn’t, and every long, sprawling hallway sat suspended in the same forever lining Rachel’s bedroom. Perfectly average wooden chairs sat on the edges; soulless hotel-art paintings and portraits of Rachel’s family through the years perched on walls that didn’t exist as the floors pulsed their message for no one in particular, as the lights floating in the nothing glowed bright with life.

The thought that she might have been able to reach out, reach through, and fall forever if she wasn’t careful stretched itself out in her mind again. But the walls were solid beneath her fingertips. Real and tangible. An illusion like passing through a door to both sides of somewhere and nowhere at once. The other side of liminal space drifting by without warning. Chloe shuddered and pressed on.

Every few turns, she stumbled onto a guard, or two, or three speaking in hushed tones and barely aware of her presence, sparing no more than an easily flickered glimpse out of the corners of their eyes like she belonged as much as anyone else. Every few turns, she found more family photos. Rachel through the years, accomplishment after accomplishment backed by the out of focus fogged glass illusion of parents as if the walls were whispering to her, _don’t worry about them, don’t worry right now._ Staring for very long strained at a part of Chloe’s heart she had never been aware of before. Eye strain for the soul.

Windows spilling strange lights and stranger shadows filled the spaces between, until eventually they came to a stop. Until eventually, _everything_ came to a stop. Chloe stumbled into a beautifully maintained kitchen absolutely empty of people. It was full enough of food that she could easily have distracted herself for minutes or hours with blindly ignoring the unsettling energy of the place. Instead, she turned, and she left, and she kept right on moving.

The halls, laid out somehow differently than they were less than minutes ago led her to a lounge, next; low lighting, mezzanine, fully stocked bar, and all, and still, still soaked through with the same disturbing sense of normality suspended in nothing. She was nowhere. She was everywhere.

She needed to breathe.

She blinked, and as if the place had read her thoughts, Chloe was moved; standing in front of a rooftop pool on the other side of that same penthouse lounge. It was completely unlike the rest of the place. It was smoothed over concrete, beautifully intricate tile, and perfectly human attempts at lighting. Fresh air and breeze wrapped around her like a long-awaited brush with reality, like passing through worlds, and a weight Chloe hadn’t realized was pressing against her chest eased to nothing with the overwhelming relief of it. A pool. An oasis in a desert.

Chirping, chattering birds and crisp morning mist filled the air, old friends passing by in the shape of hellos. That, too, she could have left behind. That, too, she could have ignored in favor of losing herself in the seemingly endless maze of halls that led to everywhere inside of nowhere. She did not. Because she could finally breathe.

Chloe moved across delicately paved and tiled flooring as carefully as she could until her toes were tipped over the edge of the pool. Beneath her, the ground was still. Behind her, a crow shouted and took flight, joined shortly by a chorus of more gathering together to fly off toward the sun. Ink dropped into the forever of sky.

She kicked off her shoes and lowered herself carefully to sitting, knees tucked up against her chest. The water was impossibly still. For a long moment, she did absolutely nothing.

Eventually, she stretched an arm carefully forward, straightening out shoulder, elbow, and wrist. She flexed her hand open, and closed, and open again. Nothing happened. She wasn’t sure what she expected; some futile hope that mimicking what she’d seen in that nightmare waiting for her at Joyce’s place would be enough to _understand._ A wish that maybe she could bury down the sense of wrong boiling over in her gut if she simply ignored every bit of damage she‘d caused since answering the phone call and stole one single moment of peace for herself.

But nothing happened. Joyce was still dead. Rachel was still hurt. Her fault. Both of them. Magic was real, and nothing happened, and nothing made sense.

Chloe groaned and rolled onto her back, each individual vertebra digging into concrete. The bare heels of her feet dipped barely into the water, an odd peace rushing up through her as the surface rippled further and further away.

She did nothing but breathe. Existence for the sake of it. Existence to spite thought. She shut her eyes, and she did not think. Seconds passed. Minutes. The sun rose steadily higher in the sky, blinding her through closed eyelids. The birds grew louder, ten and twenty songs warring to be heard. Still, she did not think.

And. Then. A lone set of unhurried footsteps approached from the lounge, slowing to a stop inches from her head. Chloe knew who it was by nothing but the sheer weight of sound.

“Kid,” Jakob’s coarse voice demanded in a tone of voice that felt distinctly less demanding than usual. Caring, almost. “What the hell are you doing.”

A lazy grin cracked at the corners of Chloe’s lips. She opened one eye and gestured grandly at the sky, its earlier pastels already washed away by the yellows and whites of the other side of dawn.

“Stargazing,” she said, trying and failing to imitate his inimitably deadpan tone of voice. Jakob pushed a quick burst of air through his nostrils, the closest he ever seemed to come to laughter, and let quiet infuse itself into the air for a pause and then more while the sun continued its slow-motion streak overhead.

“It’s ten in the morning,” he said eventually, as if that on its own were enough of an explanation.

“Pretty sure I saw one a few minutes ago,” Chloe replied with an eloquent shrug. “It coulda been a bird.”

Another soft sound, another laugh that wasn’t quite laughter, and Jakob moved. He took some short few steps over to her side, boots dragging with every move, and drew his gaze up to the clouds in the sky. His eyes fell closed, the relief washing over him nearly palpable.

“You look like absolute shit,” Chloe blurted at both the sight and the thought.

Truthfully, he looked like he hadn’t slept in days, and for a time, he didn’t answer. His eyes stayed shut, mind no doubt running on overdrive to piece together the smallest number of words necessary for an answer.

“I just got back from your place.” Another pause, another breath. “The boss wants to see you.”

Addressing either point seemed particularly unique and unpleasant shades of upsetting, but Chloe knew, too, that staying quiet would have been worse.

“Which place?” she asked.

“Both,” Jakob said simply. And then he didn’t, huffing out a sharp burst of air and looking away like someone distinctly less used to it. “You and the girl are too old to still be acting like horny teenagers. That apartment was a disaster.”

“Nice try gramps, but we’re acting like horny adults these days.” Chloe offered all too easily, an offhand nothing in a conversation far past them. She hadn’t remembered leaving the apartment a mess, but then, her memories weren’t in the best place. She hadn’t remembered, but then, she’d been busy hurting herself and Rachel. There were worse reasons to forget.

“Hmm.”

“Fine. Consider me scolded over my icky sex cooties. Are you gonna yell at me about magic next?”

In any other situation, Jakob turning to meet her gaze fast enough for his neck to let out an audible _crack_ might have been entertaining. Chloe might have laughed. They were not, however, in any other situation. People were dead.

“Rach explained,” Chloe offered. “Not much. Enough.”

No response rose to break the tension of that admission. Jakob contented himself with sizing her up in silence, in that inscrutable way he had, like seeing straight through her, like thoughts masking thoughts until there was nothing left but to crumble unsteadily away inside the space of a single slow breath.

“Your stepfather,” he said. “He wasn’t there.”

Chloe tried — _tried,_ because she knew it wouldn’t work — swallowing down her nerves. It didn’t work. Because that could have meant anything. It could have meant everything. Gone. He was dead the last time she saw him. “Oh.”

“A jackass of a detective has been looking into you.”

“Oh,” Chloe said, again, because nothing else seemed to fit the shape of those facts.

She let them both hang in the air, returning her gaze slowly to the sky. Thankfully, Jakob did too, and they watched together as a distant plane broke through clouds, rising higher, and higher, and out of sight. Jakob leaned his weight on one foot, then the other, quiet enough to miss had she not already been listening.

“You should have stayed with Rachel. It’s easy to get lost.” Jakob said, already moving on, eyes still trained on the clouds. He sounded lost in thought.

“Please, my sense of direction is impeccable,” Chloe said, but she knew. She knew. Whatever mysterious force had placed her outside felt even more unknowable than magic, and magic was already…She tried not to think about it. A tangible weight heavy with tension laced itself through the empty space of breeze, and it slowed Chloe’s breath to near nothing. Voice slowed back to breath. Everything to nothing. “Anyway, don’t worry so much. I made it here eventually. This place, like…Showed me things. About Rachel, I think. Pictures? Of her mom? Truth be told, I’m too busy freaking out about the whole magic thing to be freaking out about anything else. This place is…”

Jakob studied her in silence for an eternity and more, confusion surrounding him like a second skin. His expression flickered at her mention of Rachel’s family photos, a muscle in his jaw barely twitching, a light in his eyes dulling, a concerted internal attempt to wipe himself into a blank slate of empty expression trying and failing to cover over it all.

He cleared his throat roughly. “It is.”

And that was that. Chloe hummed, and Jakob looked away, and that was that, because they were already back where they always ended up: staring down reminder after reminder that they couldn’t do conversation with each other. People were allowed to exist together. They could be alone together. That was the only thing they ever seemed to be able to manage together.

Chloe tried stubbornly to fill the silence anyway. “My — someone I used to know would’ve loved this place. She was always looking for weird places to take pictures.” She didn’t know why she said it, or why that someone had been in her dreams like she’d never abandoned everything she ever knew for the sake of a shot in the dark. Or. Why that someone had been able to do it so easily. Like Chloe never really mattered to her at all.

“We should go,” Jakob said, rightfully ignoring her. It was a stupid thing to bring up. “The boss gets impatient.”

“I just got here,” said Chloe anyway, pinned in place by some frustrating fear for what leaving might entail. Her dreams, confusing as they were, were at least safe. She would have to leave eventually, but eventually could always be later. “At least let me enjoy it, first.”

Jakob said nothing. He gave no indication he’d heard her speak at all. Except that he did. He sat down slowly, limbs creaking, and popping, and groaning, and moaning in all the ways people and their bodies did when time had had enough of them. A breeze rippled over the surface of the pool, and Chloe smiled faintly to herself, holding that storm of thought just beneath the surface

Time passed in waves, the sky growing warm enough to weigh Chloe’s chest down with the easy, easy pressure of the sun. An in and out like the tide; breath coming easy, ribs stretching loose, and lungs filled wide until sleep and the day swallowed up every last thing but the soul of peace to wrap up thought in its lightest embrace. Things were bad. Things were confusing. Things were unsure. But they could still be good.

Eventually, a stranger’s ungraceful entrance broke her stalling in half. He said nothing loud enough for Chloe to hear, but she could feel him sidle up behind Jakob, could hear him lean down to whisper in his ear, could hear the resulting frustrated sigh, and even the turn to say,

“Kid. Time’s up.”

~*~

Chloe couldn’t be sure they passed through any of the same halls on their way to see him. _The boss._ None of them looked the same. They all looked the same. It felt impossible to know anything but that the building was shifting and changing as easily as leaves in the breeze to guide them on their path.

A massive gilded set of double doors rose to bar their path in no time at all, notably absent of any of the same security at Rachel’s; no metal, no key cards, no guards. The man who had brought them knocked twice before effortlessly throwing the doors open and disappearing back into the void.

Inside the office sat a lone desk, backed by massive and sprawling bookshelves filled nearly to overflowing with titles written in languages Chloe didn’t know. A man she could only assume by the vague shape of him was the boss sat waiting pleasantly, arms folded in front of him. He looked, at worst, like a politician. A perfectly mundane everyman smile on a perfectly ordinary face. His hair, too, seemed aggressively average. It was dark brown, greying in strips at the temples and worn in a perfectly average cut, and the disparity of image between him and the place of overwhelming magic he inhabited was enough to send Chloe’s heart banging frantically against her ribs. Her breath grew unsteady. He was harmless. He was terrifying.

“Chloe Price,” he said then, in a perfectly respectable voice with no defining characteristics at all. “It’s so good to finally meet you.”

At her side, Jakob cleared his throat, and it was only then that Chloe realized she had been staring, speechless, for nearly a whole minute.

“Thank…You?” she said, asked, her breath and her voice somehow miraculously level.

The man at the desk bared his barely off-white and not-quite perfectly aligned teeth in a still wider smile. The smile of any family man on earth. “My name is James Amber, but I imagine by now you know that already,” he said in his inoffensively average voice. “From what I gather, you’re lucky to be alive.”

The room turned too hot, too cold, too fast. Beside her, Jakob went absolutely still.


	6. Jakob

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “You don’t trust him either,” she said, almost asked.
> 
> “Don’t judge anyone by me, kid.” Jakob shrugged slow. It was good that she didn’t trust the boss. It was worse that she’d seen him flinch. “I don’t even trust God.”

**Jakob:** Keep Chloe with you.

 **Jakob:** No questions.

Still no answer. Jakob pocketed his phone and sank further into his seat, eyes falling closed. There was probably nothing to worry about, probably any number of reasons for Rachel not to answer when Chloe’s presence was all it took for her to forget the world for days at a time. Probably. It was only, Chloe was at the heart of an unprecedented emergency, and Jakob could really have done with some small sense of reassurance that his absence wasn’t a problem in order to dull the razor-sharp pricks of panic clawing up his spine.

Even if he’d spent enough time around the two of them to know how to suppress it, a little bit of hustle would have been nice, was all.

A car door opened and closed some three spaces down the street. The driver paused for a moment, patted themselves down, and walked off into the night. Whoever Jakob was watching for, it wasn’t him. It hadn’t been anyone else in the last hour, either. No one but low-level witches and ordinaries stumbling back home in the middle of night.

A high rise on the Upper West Side was already a smart place to keep Chloe hidden, but to find one so devoid of notable magicians was something else entirely; there didn’t seem to be anything more than the usual dull hum of life on any given floor of the building. Rachel did good.

When it came to Chloe’s protection, she _always_ did good, but it never stopped making him proud to be reminded. That would have to be enough, he knew, to clear away his worry. She was learning. She could handle herself.

With a sigh, he reached for the glove compartment and pulled out the pocket pistol carefully hidden away. It was nearly too small for his hand and looked more toy than gun, but it was enough. The heavier vehicles Amber House owned contained heavier — at the very least more lethal — weaponry, but Jakob had been aiming for discreet ever since he’d gone back to retrace Chloe’s steps. Small and concealable was enough; he didn’t need damage, he needed an opening to get close. He tucked the barrel calmly into the back of his slacks and climbed out into the street, circling for the trunk. Once more, he checked his phone.

**Jakob:** Keep Chloe with you.

 **Jakob:** No questions.

Still no answer. There was always a reason, he reminded himself, unrolling his sleeves and fishing out the rest of his suit. The full look wasn’t any more necessary for blending in than the gun or the crowd, but they _did_ make things easier. In the end, that was what mattered. People tended to react poorly to giant disheveled men reeking of sweat, blood, and magic. Not _exactly_ necessary, still _mostly_ necessary. It’d been a long night.

Jakob slipped into the jacket, rolling his shoulders and tugging lightly on his sleeves until he was at least partway to presentable: sharp-enough lines, deep black that almost seemed to eat moonlight itself, and soft amber accents. The hair was still a mess. The hair was always a mess.

The apartment lobby, when he walked inside, was nearly as bad. He might have politely called it an assault on the senses. Modern maximalist design sensibility. It took seconds for his mind to separate ceiling from wall from floor, and seconds more to send the message to his eyes. Enough excess to give the eye strain of Amber House a run for its money.

Jakob bit down a smile. Rachel had thought through more than location; if anything ever happened, the place was practically overflowing with ways to disappear.

“Excuse me,” he said, veering somewhere toward friendly as he turned to the concierge’s desk. “I’m looking for someone.”

The concierge glanced up at him, disgust plain on her face like strangers attempting to be companionable was the most upsetting development in her world. Another small point in Rachel’s favor; no one was getting information from her without a fight.

“Name?” she asked in a short, gruff tone.

Jakob fell into the lie so easily it almost tasted like truth. “Jakob Murton. I’m here about my daughter, Chloe Price.”

“Uh huh.”

He stayed quiet. He focused his mind inward, turning magic on himself to stifle his presence; to bleed off comfort and ease like breath as he rolled his shoulders forward. A cheap trick to look small. Smaller. Small enough.

The woman hadn’t noticed it happening and still somehow managed to look unimpressed. “You _sure_ you’re family, stranger?”

A smile cracked at the corners of his mouth. No magic, just muscle. _You can trust me,_ it said. And the concierge did, throwing herself over to her keyboard for the opportunity to stop seeing it.

Jakob eased off with a single step back. He adjusted his collar and toyed blindly with his cufflinks. Throughout the lobby, footsteps echoed. Voices carried. The white noise of the computer continued.

“Oh,” the concierge blurted then, shocked and more than a few notches realer. “ _That_ Chloe. Her wife is adorable — she actually left a message requesting that we make accommodations for a Jakob Murton if he ever stopped by. One moment.”

“ _…Wife._ ”

“Yeah, Rachel something? Absolute ray of sunshine.”

“Hmm,” Jakob answered, reaching for his ID.

The concierge didn’t let him, waving him off with a “No no, that’s fine. She, the wife, Rachel…How did she put it? _You’ll know it’s him because he’s built like ten trucks and talks like crushed up gravel._ And…I mean… _”_

Jakob raised a single brow.

“I actually,” the concierge bit off a laugh, wistfully bringing fingers to rest on her right wrist. “I thought she was full of it, but then she showed me a picture — I’m actually kind of amazed I didn’t recognize you sooner. Let me get you your key.”

Jakob adjusted his jacket again. The surprise over just how far Rachel’s work reached hit hard. He recognized the trick — she’d been practicing for months — but to see the end result, to see it executed so flawlessly filled him with a pride he wasn’t quite sure how to accept. To influence nerves so simultaneously deeply and subtly that the memory of her touch and her word lodged itself in minds so long after the fact…That girl had too much charm for her own good.

“Room fifteen-oh-seven,” the concierge said on her return, keycard in hand.

He accepted with a nod and a grin. On the elevator trip up, he checked his phone again.

**Jakob:** Keep Chloe with you.

 **Jakob:** No questions.

Still no answer. He groaned into the cramped space of the elevator. If nothing else, the lack of response meant Chloe wasn’t going anywhere.

The lights above the doors continued steadily ticking away. Ten, and eleven and twelve. Jakob centered himself; he needed to focus. He needed to be sure things were safe. The lights continued, fourteen, fifteen, and stopped, doors sliding finally, gracefully, open. Just as he reached Chloe’s apartment at the end of the hall, his phone began to ring.

“Rachel,” he answered without bothering to check the screen. The door clicked easily open.

What replied from the other end was very much _not_ Rachel. It was the long in and out of a pull against a cigarette. Someone sipping from a glass of wine. The distant whine of car horns, yelling, and the squeak of rubber on asphalt. “Guess again.”

“Sam,” he said, cracking open Chloe’s door somewhere close to silently. The edge caught against a stray cardboard box, its contents — cast iron, stock pots, and cutting boards — spilled across the floor, ‘silently’ suddenly flung and shattered against the wall. On reflex, Jakob’s free hand went to his gun, every sense and every nerve adjusting to the dark of the apartment with the full strength of magical assistance. His ears picked up on the softest creaks the next apartment over, on insects flapping wings and tapping up the walls, and his pupils dilated nearly to their limit, turning the indistinguishable dark clearer than a room flooded with light. He existed, for the moment, lost within the concept of sense itself. If someone was hiding, they were hiding well.

“Too busy to talk?” Sam asked, doubtlessly in response to the mountain of sound he’d just unleashed. Every individual crackle and pop of sound compression was a drum beating through his body. His senses dialed slowly back.

“Never.” Saying yes would have been pointless, and that aside, pretending distraction was a fine enough next step. Better to let a would-be attacker think he was caught off guard. He was still looking. Still listening. Still coiled up and ready to strike. “Just following up on something for the girls.”

“Oh! Everything is okay, I hope.”

Dropping to sit on his haunches, Jakob poked through the mess. He half expected something to have gouged out a perfectly good chunk of hardwood, and the last thing he wanted was to be responsible for ruining whatever small slice of good those girls had managed to take.

When he finished, Jakob looked into the dark ahead, hallway fluorescents straining to reach distant surfaces through the half open door. What they touched felt cloaked in faint auras of teal. “Mmh.”

“Don’t go drifting off on me now; I asked a question.”

“For now.” Inhale. Exhale. The sounds of existence rushed through him like waves. “Hard to know.”

Jakob took his time moving further, dragging his magnified senses over every surface he could reach, pulsing them out to the pads of his fingers to sift through air like tiny grains of sand in search of any lingering trace of magic. There was almost nothing. But only almost. Just past the veil of Rachel so thoroughly entangled in the air was something else. Something different. Something every bit as unsettling as the murder scene he’d left earlier.

Something — some _one_ — had come looking. Who, for what, and why, he didn’t know. But he intended to find out. Whether Chloe knew anything or not, they were long overdue for a talk.

Sam cleared their throat. “That _for now_ sounds like it’s got you worried.”

“Hmm. Yeah.”

“Something happened to one of them, then?”

Jakob paused in what was probably intended to be the living room, the pads of his fingers coming to rest on the arm of a couch. The space was empty of anything but it and several overturned boxes, so he turned his attention to the doors on the opposite wall. “Something happened.”

“Something bad?”

“Something bad.”

“You keep them safe, Jakob.”

“Hmm,” Jakob answered through another deep breath. He eased open the bathroom door as slow as he could. It, too, was empty but for stray towels and the scattered contents of cardboard boxes. The bedroom was empty as well, though the mess of clothes and sheets there was distinctly more familiar. It made his skin crawl to intrude on, even despite his reason for coming. But. It at least confirmed the apartment was empty. He was alone.

On the other end of the line, Sam hummed thoughtfully. “When do you think you’ll make it home?”

“Tomorrow at the earliest. There’s too much to do.”

“There’s _always_ too much,” they said without a shred of ill intent. “In that case, leftovers are in the fridge. I’ll be gone for the next week, but don’t forget; you still owe me that date night.”

The laugh that escaped Jakob then was barely a laugh, barely a breath, but it still managed to carry through the phone. Sam hummed, again, satisfied with having pulled it from him, but before they could add anything else, Jakob said, “Of course not. You made me promise.”

“And yet that almost never works out for me.”

“Hmm. Don’t die before then.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” said Sam, like it had ever been that simple. “Take care of those girls. I miss them.”

“Mmh.”

Jakob ended the call.

 _Goodbye_ and _I love you_ were never exactly a part of their repertoire, but even still, they’d managed to fall away completely too long ago to remember. Too many jobs ago. Too many lives ago. Back when Sam was still a physical security consultant and he was still an inexperienced assassin who knew too little; who needed mantras like _I have killed, but I am not a killer_ just to stay sane. They were promises with no business in their present. They were things that belonged safely in the embrace of past lives and the next.

Jakob scanned over the apartment one last time, trying in vain to reconstruct what had happened. The mess was too deliberate and too calculated. Something, by the looks of things, should have been missing, except that there was no evidence anything was gone. Maybe the mysterious someone only wanted him to believe theft was the case. Maybe, that their sickly magic was still in the air was enough.

A companion piece to the murder? A loose end? A barefaced threat? Jakob shoved the thought from his head. It was late enough to be early. He needed to to get back to the hotel. To regroup. To think. Short of placing his own people nearby, there was nothing to be done against the mystery magician. Rachel had already more than handled the rest.

Or so he thought. Just then, the voice of a young man echoed in from the hall.

“This is the police,” he shouted, too loud, too brave, and too soon before pushing open the door. He didn’t bother with the light switch and ended up tripping, stumbling, nearly falling on their face as a result.

The puppy boy detective. Something needed doing after all.

“Detective,” Jakob said in greeting. The barrel of the boy’s gun pointed unsteadily in his direction. “I don’t recall inviting you in.”

The detective did not put his gun away, though he did lower his aim to the floor, hesitating once and twice to glance at the number on the front door before finally committing to the movement. “Oh. You. This is — I’m looking into — never mind. Why are you here?”

Confusion twisted and turned at the boy’s face. He almost seemed uncomfortable with the emotion itself, and a low hum — not _quite_ a laugh — pushed past Jakob’s throat at the sight. He took one lazy step closer. He did not, however, answer the question.

“What the fuck is so funny?” asked the detective, grip on the gun going tighter as he tried to speak with the authority of someone twice his age. “You have no business here! You’re not a part of this investigation, I ought to bring you in for interfering with a crime scene!”

“Tell me,” Jakob said, brushing the tantrum away. He focused inward, further than he had in weeks until he could feel energy course through him free and unrestrained. A clarity like ice filled every inch of him. His body cooled and his senses sharpened to the edges of possibility with that freedom, sapping heat from the air itself until the detective was caught on the edge of its grasp, trembling either from fear or the cold. “Why are _you_ here?”

“I…Evidence. This place — there was…”

“ _Evidence._ Does the captain know about this?”

The flash of guilt in his eyes answered the question just fine.

“You —”

Jakob frowned. “Yes, I. _I_ have a key.”

“The…Chloe Price,” the boy detective said, but he was wavering, nerves and lost surety already infesting his every voiced syllable.

“Chloe Price is none of your business,” said Jakob, reaching into his jacket and pulling out a business card. He used the innocence of the movement to mask a second step closer.

“ _Chief of Security. Amber Hotel,_ ” the detective read under his breath after snatching the card away.

Jakob cleared his throat. “There is nothing for you to investigate.”

“But —”

“I’m here, by request, to pick up a few things for my favorite client.”

“I —”

“Now.” Jakob took his final step closer, the puppy boy squarely within reach, no crowds, or colleagues, or Stephs to stop what should rightfully have happened earlier that night. The momentary flash of fear on his face said he hadn’t noticed it happening. “What are you doing, detective, breaking into property that isn’t yours?”

The kid gulped down his fear, neck craned nearly all the way back in a futile attempt to keep eye contact. His grip on the gun wavered. “I — I’ll need to confirm that story, of course. Your… Chloe Price will obviously need to come down to the station and —”

“No.”

“N — No?”

“No.”

The fist colliding with the detective’s nose crushed any further response into choked off gurgles. He was barely begun crumpling into the ground when Jakob wrapped his fist around the detective’s throat and sent magic digging into the core of his nerve with enough violent pressure to awaken pain like a volume dial cranked far enough past _max_ to snap free. His consciousness faded in fractions of a second. He dropped like a rock. There and gone.

Satisfaction was too light a word to describe what Jakob felt. He’d spent the night channeling fear into fury, and the chance to see it free was like a suffocating weight fallen away. For the space of two slow breaths, he stood without seeing and thought without moving.

And then a plan settled. He dug carefully through the detective’s clothes for his wallet, phone, and badge, tucking them away in his jacket’s inner pocket. The gun, he hid next to his own.

~*~

The detective’s body hit the floor with a fleshy thud and a chorus of onlookers’ offended gasps. Far more quietly and deliberately out of sight of the growing audience, Jakob placed both handguns on the concierge’s desk.

If he were only after embarrassment, he would gladly have taken both with him and dropped the body somewhere quieter. The thing about _only,_ though, was that it left the detective room to come back, and so _only_ became one very public show featuring an unconscious man without ID, an unregistered pocket pistol, and a very pliable concierge.

Making enemies was never ideal, but Jakob had neither the time nor the patience to deal with maneuvering around the boy cop’s budding fixation. Better to take him off the board as decisively as possible, as early as possible. Better to make sure he wasn’t around to cause trouble in a situation far more dangerous. Things were already too dangerous.

“Uh?” the concierge voiced from behind the desk, not quite finding words.

Jakob raised his hands to his chest in surrender, grinning a pleasant grin. “Sorry for the trouble. Would you mind calling security?”

“Fuck no I would not,” answered the woman, Rachel’s magic already at work turning her toward trust. She frantically tapped away at the silent alarm. “Is…Uh, is everything okay?”

“Yes. Chloe and Rachel aren’t here.”

The woman let out a tense breath. “Oh, thank God.”

“This man, though,” Jakob went on, lies rolling off his tongue easily, in the most comforting voice he could muster. “A stalker. His behavior has been mostly harmless until tonight.”

“Jesus. Ew, okay, I, uh —” she rambled and panicked, trailing off and still jamming away at the alarm. Two men in unassuming uniforms strolled into the lobby before she could get out another word, and a friendly back and forth had them carrying Jakob’s troubles away.

The ease of the entire exchange — the smiles, the laughs, the light in their eyes when Jakob offered his name and the concierge offered _Rachel_ — put him under the distinct impression that Rachel’s efforts extended farther than he would ever know. The pride sitting at the base of his ribs swelled, finally having found its footing. Rachel had learned well. Better than Jakob ever hoped to see. Soon, the only thing left would be for her to find enough strength to take Chloe and vanish. The Houses would grind them into nothing if they stayed.

Back on the street, Jakob looked, for a moment, to the sun rising steadily higher. He pushed a breath through his nostrils and very openly wiped down everything else he’d taken from the detective before tossing it into the first trash bin in sight.

~*~

Jakob blinked slowly.

The bulk of the boss’ intimidation speech drifted in one ear and out the other. The message was clear as day.

_You’re lucky to be alive._

Chloe _was._ So was he. James Amber knew exactly what Jakob found. He was bragging, fishing to see how he would react at the implication that he was no longer necessary.

A thick pressure built in the back of his throat, but he managed to swallow it back in time, hidden behind a slow blink. It was not the time for worrying; he’d done more than enough for the amount of work that still needed doing.

So, he stopped. He listened. The meaningless dialogue — _it might be for the best if,_ and _you’re always welcome,_ and _any family of Rachel’s_ — continued uninterrupted. The boss meant exactly none of it; his eyes were on Chloe, but it was Jakob he was watching.

_Last night was about you; last night will not end with the morning._

Jakob hadn’t expected it to. But he knew now, at least, where he stood. Once Chloe was back with Rachel, he could confront that fact outright.

After the boss’ conversation slowed to a still, they were excused. The closing doors echoed through the forever of halls. Chloe took one breath and turned to Jakob. Watching. Thinking.

“You don’t trust him either,” she said, almost asked.

“Don’t judge anyone by me, kid.” Jakob shrugged slow. It was good that she didn’t trust the boss. It was worse that she’d seen him flinch. “I don’t even trust God.”

“Hmm,” Chloe said.

A slow minute passed, her struggle over whether to leave nearly tangible. Jakob half expected her to say something else until the tension snapped beneath the sound of footsteps padding closer. Rachel barreled around the corner, wild-eyed, hair mussed with sleep, and wearing nothing but an oversized tank top.

“ _There_ you are,” she said, bleeding relief into the air like a machine venting steam.

Jakob’s gut dropped a full inch deeper at the vibrant purple bruise bloomed across her throat, and he glanced subtly in Chloe’s direction for explanation only to catch her looking to the floor. Rachel on the other hand, scoffed. She was already slipped back into her usual calm, movement like water until she was pressed against Chloe’s chest. Jakob looked slowly away.

“Don’t start,” Rachel whispered so softly, so carefully, that the spell of her voice seemed to pull the walls themselves in, echoing reassurance. Magic to magic. “You did nothing wrong. Come back to bed.”

“It’s already tomorrow, Rach,” said Chloe, faltering and fragile, and even Jakob could tell her resistance was paper thin.

“I know. We’re not going back for sleep.”

“…Oh.”

“I need my favorite big strong woman in the whole wide world to rub very expensive lotions all over my many sexy new injuries.”

Chloe whimpered something small and guilty. Loudly clearing his throat, Jakob took two long strides away. He might have guessed at how the bruise came to be.

Then, quieter, Rachel whispered, and the walls pulsed to life again. “It’s not your fault, Chloe. I’m still here.”

Jakob had never seen anything like it. The House itself felt under her control, and Rachel seemed hardly aware it was happening, because they left, the two of them, without another word. Jakob breathed in. Out. Time stretched thin and slow as the girls fell out of earshot, the starless expanse wisping and curling ineffectually in their wake. The office doors opened again.

Inside, a massive window that hadn’t existed even minutes before sat at right angles with the bookshelves. The boss stood in front of it, staring out of it, arms folded behind his back as the daylit skyline shined. He favored Jakob with a glance and a soft smile. Calculated in his every movement, even — especially — in the small.

“How are you, Jakob?” he asked.

Jakob hesitated, unsure. “Sir.”

“Please. James, for now. It’s just us.”

Jakob nodded. His jaw clenched tighter.

“How are things at home, lately?”

“Mmh.” It was not an answer. It was enough of an answer.

“Good. Good.”

“Mhm.”

The boss sighed, staring Jakob down with a look of disappointment. Frustration. But he never stopped smiling, fading slow into expressions from the far-flung past like a version of himself that Jakob might have once trusted far more. Even just the hint of memory somehow chipped away at his defenses; Jakob didn’t trust him, but the boss smiled and he _wanted_ to. Nostalgia like a weapon. James Amber: calculated even in that. “Fine, then. Straight to business. I borrowed one of your subordinates to piece together your night. Judging by what he told me, I think we have indulged Rachel long enough.”

“Hmm,” Jakob hummed.

The boss paused, lips twitching into another wistful grin. “The future of our House is at stake. That girl, Chloe Price…I could put up with her presence when she was only a…” His brow drew down, the full of him falling momentarily inward. He resurfaced after a beat; disdain tight in his voice. “A _pet._ When she was nothing but a stray Rachel took an interest in. No more.”

A muscle twitched beneath Jakob’s left eye. Whatever else he felt, he ground to nothing between his teeth. “Mmh,” he voiced, empty.

The boss nodded, as if deciding, as if Jakob had provided him with more than a syllable of thought. He was lying, of course; Chloe had been, in his eyes, a problem for years.

_Untalented. Unknowing. Not the slightest drop of potential._

_A distraction. A pest. A worthless waste of time._

But there was an order to things with him. There was a song and a dance the boss offered expressly to see others squirm. Even Jakob; their distrust had been given too much time to grow both ways, and there was no more going back no matter how many nostalgic whims he whipped up to string them along.

“You want her gone,” Jakob said.

“In a manner of speaking.” _I want her dead,_ he meant. _But I will settle for gone._ “I’ve been informed that Black House’s succession ceremony is soon. Alexander, that fossil, finally passed, and his daughter understandably wants the whole affair over as quickly as possible. I will not have Rachel representing our House at the event so openly attached to the ordinary world. _Ours_ is changing, and those ties are nothing but a weakness.

We are more than relics of the past to be forgotten. We are order. We are the Executioners. The Houses enjoy success because _we_ allow it, and it is long past time someone reminded them of that fact. Rachel is the key.”

Fitting words, Jakob supposed, from the man whose wife vanished days before his long fall into secrecy and solitude. “Hmm,” he said. It was all he trusted himself to say.

The boss turned away from the window, then. He was calm, cheerful, arms still held casually behind his back. He spoke as if they were discussing something as light as the weather. “I can forgive your distraction so long as the girl disappears.”

With one final smile and nod — both of them perfectly innocent and perfectly at odds with his request — the boss stepped close enough to pat Jakob on the shoulder, and he left, vanished into the black. When Jakob was sure he was alone, he let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding in.

“Fuck,” he whispered. He turned to the window. Minutes passed like seconds as he stared blankly out at the city.

His phone rang after a time, muffled and still loud enough to crack the silence like ice. He accepted the call, but he did not speak.

“Jakob Murton,” a voice said, putting as much macho into it as they could. Enough that, were Jakob in any better state of mind, he might have respected the commitment. But there were decades of scarier people than a nasally pubescent kid trying to intimidating him in his past, and there were hours of children attempting to scare him in his present. “We’re going to meet. I’d like to discuss Chloe Price.”

“Mmh,” grunted Jakob, as if considering the threat. He was not, but the child on the other end of the line didn’t need to know that.

The timing of the call should have worried him. The _subject_ of the call should have worried him. Both, he ignored.

“Good. Noon. Two days from now. The bar: Jefferson’s. You know where to find it.”

“Mhm.”

The call ended. Jakob grunted. And sighed.

Jefferson’s could only have meant one thing. The place was less a bar lately than a clubhouse for one very specific magician. The black sheep of Silver House. The boy who’d spent his teen years disowned and living with witches. The boy who’d slaughtered every one of his coven at twenty and returned to his House like not a single day had passed. He’d kept his mentor’s property as a sort of trophy.

Silver House never spoke of the incident — the boy’s departure _or_ his return — and his Father continued on as if nothing at all had changed. No efforts were made to find a new heir. No time was given to explaining his years away. He was simply there, and gone, and there. The Houses’ worst kept secret brought back to the family with eyes wide shut.

Jakob dragged both hands down his face and left the office. Chloe and Rachel were in trouble. He knew even less than he did earlier. He needed a drink.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> developments


	7. Rachel

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Besides,” she said, pads of her fingers following every line of that mottled, purple mark. “She only hurts me when I ask very nicely.”
> 
> The disgust he tried and failed to mask only pushed her further. She _hated_ being watched. “Ah.”
> 
> “I ask a lot.”

There was, Rachel thought, something almost romantic in the image of Chloe behind the lounge bar. Crisp new clothes and the half-rainbow of a fading dye job. Rolled up grey shirtsleeves and the sharp thorns of tattoos. Hardwood and liquor. Magic and not.

For minutes, for longer, she’d been digging aimlessly through the shelves and the cupboards in search of something, or maybe nothing. Every now and again Rachel would catch her popping up, or stepping down, or turning around to get a better look at the label of a bottle expensive enough to deserve multiple migraines, despite that it tasted identical to big brand two for one nothings available at any given corner shop.

Rachel could have mentioned it; after all, she’d spent her early teens drinking herself down from rage in that very spot often enough to know every name and every taste by heart, but there was something in the way Chloe moved that burned the words to ash almost before they could form.

So, instead, she blinked. Her gaze drifted to the pool outside.

It was all so easy. And it was completely, utterly wrong. Not once in the years since she’d first found the courage to introduce herself had Rachel seen Chloe manage to deal with something so bad, so well. Magic was real, and it nearly took her life. And yet…

But that was what it all came down to, wasn’t it? _And yet._ Things should have been one way, and yet they were another. They should have left years ago, and yet they were stuck. Chloe’s first brush with magic should have been nothing short of a gift. And yet.

Rachel had seen inside her heart. She’d let feeling and thought wrap around her like twin souls hurtling through the stars, a supernova whispering that they were always meant to see each other in that way. Chloe’s happiness was an impossible truth. And yet. And yet.

And yet.

Two hefty glasses clinked against the bar counter. Judging by the sound, the cheap crystal set that twisted up in a spiral and shined like rainbows in the sun. The heavy ones. The pretty ones. The only ones that didn’t look like they might shatter if you breathed on them too hard. Her favorite.

“What’s got you thinkin’ so loud?” Chloe asked, task temporarily abandoned in favor of leaning across the counter. She was smiling a smile strong enough to overpower the last hints of dusk. One stray beam of light crossed her face, just beneath her eyes, and even that was nothing in the face of it.

“I’m wondering,” answered Rachel, resolving to bring the worry up some other time, or at least some other place. It felt too strange, there, in the center of it all. “How hard the floor would be on your neck.”

One perfect eyebrow jumped higher on Chloe’s face.

“I want to sit on your face,” Rachel said.

“Yeah, that was clear. Context clues.”

“You sure, Chlo? I don’t mind going into detail.”

“It’s,” Chloe said, and breathed in the shape of a laugh. “It’s fine. Really.”

Even curled up, knees tucked to her chest and chin tucked to her knees, Rachel found a way to shrug. She sniffed lightly and blinked slow. “You look sexy behind the bar.”

“Little miss rich girl’s working class fetish strikes again,” Chloe said, turning away like she’d still taken the comment seriously and was already preparing for round ten, or twenty, or something or other even after the day and the night they’d spent fucking the fear from their system for the chance to explore their newfound limits.

“You know me. I love to be a class traitor. It gets me all hot and heavy when you start talking about healthcare and a living wage.”

“Let me get into proper tipping percentages and we can get a real party going.”

“Oh honey, don’t stop.”

For a pause, Chloe gave no response but an impossibly fond smirk and a sharply made exhale, and so Rachel turned absentmindedly back toward the window. Clouds passed overhead, casting the world in shadow for the beat of a breath. A shoe scuffed against tile once, twice. Quietly, straining not to be heard, Chloe cleared her throat.

“It’s not bad,” she announced. “Throw me a cushion and I’ll be fine.”

Behind her eyelashes, behind some few blue strands of hair fallen in front of her face, she was glowing, still, like she knew exactly what Rachel had held herself back from asking. _Quit trying to be sneaky,_ she seemed to say, more vividly than Rachel had ever before been able to imagine her voice, _I’m not scared of you._

And maybe she wasn’t. But she was scared of something, and if it wasn’t her…Magic was the only thing left. It hurt to consider; that even through all her efforts, bad timing might have been all it took to turn what should have been a gift into one more source of pain in Chloe’s eyes. One more way for people to hurt her worse than they already had. One more thing she’d taught herself to adapt to or else be crushed by. It hurt, because the way she was staring made Rachel feel the echo of ache, the acute loss of self from their last fragile moments of connection as clear as if she were living them over again.

Rachel wasn’t sure she could ever live without magic. But if it was what Chloe needed to be okay, then maybe. Maybe.

“Later. Mix me up something fancy, bartender,” she said, settling more fully into the sofa, comfortably spread out across its length.

Chloe didn’t mix her a drink, of course, but she _did_ wink before pouring three fingers of very expensive whiskey into both glasses. The bottle stayed opened and abandoned on the bar as she made her way over, and when she sat — two cushions away, both glasses still held in hand, and challenge sparkling in her eyes — Rachel moved. Maybes never were worth it.

Gone was her indecision, gone was the worry over whether she would ever again have the chance to wrap herself around the core of Chloe’s being, because Chloe was there, happy and bright, still every bit the same person she’d always been, and in the depths of her ocean blue eyes, everything else ceased to matter.

“Chlo,” Rachel whispered when she was slid into Chloe’s lap, leaning close and then closer, breath against lips and lips against skin.

“In the flesh,” Chloe said, entirely unaffected but for her smile grown impossibly large.

Unaffected, but distracted. Rachel plucked both drinks free from her grip. She downed her own in one smooth pull, tapping the rim of the other to the tip of Chloe’s nose like an unspoken _gotcha_ before handing them both back. It burned all the way down, settling like a low flame in the pit of her stomach. She followed its lead; slid down and further, stretching out until her head was settled on Chloe’s thighs.

“Thanks for the drink, gorgeous,” she teased.

“Anything for my favorite customer.” The voice of her imagined Chloe sprang up again, gone as soon as it was there. _I mean it, there is nothing,_ it promised, ringing through her bones with the force of a quake, _that you could ever do to scare me away._

Her imagined Chloe was a bit of a drama queen.

The other Chloe, the real Chloe, the one being used as a pillow, hummed. She placed the empty glass off to the side, bringing her own to rest against the bridge of Rachel’s nose. Relaxation softened her with every slow sip that she took, with every slow circle she ran over Rachel’s brow, pretending not to stare. Outside, the breeze picked up, growing steadily louder. Breath rumbled through Chloe’s chest, and her eyes flickered like the waves of the tide. A trick of the light.

Months passed them by, compressed into no more than minutes. Rachel felt the bulk of the drink beating through them both with each that passed, a relentless drum of mutual ease. At some point, their glasses vanished, long since drained and made useless. In their absence, Chloe had taken to occupying herself drawing aimless patterns through Rachel’s hair, calloused fingers and blunt nails dragging pleasure like fire in their wake. It was a struggle not to push for more.

“You, uh,” Chloe said after a time, the slightest waver in her voice. “When I snuck out earlier.”

“I still need to punish you for that,” Rachel said and reached to cup Chloe’s cheek. To reassure her, or maybe just to cover the faint feeling of satisfaction of comfort over the realization that she _was_ nervous after all; that she hadn’t imagined it. Rachel reached, but couldn’t quite manage aiming, her limbs just slightly too sluggish with liquor, and rather than a gesture of comfort, Chloe got a palm slapped flat against her face.

And yet. Somehow, it worked, washing away that hint of fear. She chuckled something easy enough to remind of simpler times and lapped out her tongue, rough, and wet, and cold, only speaking again once Rachel’s hand was safely fallen away, pressed firm against the beat of her heart.

“There were pictures,” Chloe said like something being asked, softly in intent if not quite in tone. “You and your dad, and…Your mom. I never knew she…”

Rachel went still. She wasn’t quite sure what she’d expected to hear, but it certainly wasn’t that.

“She’s gone,” she said reflexively, voice turned to stone. Pretending it had ever been that simple was a lie she knew by heart.

But it was _Chloe_ asking, and if anyone deserved more than a ten year old lie, it was her. A rough inhale tore a path into her lungs, and she leaned heavily into Chloe’s touch hoping blindly to hide it. All of her felt out of reach, beyond control, drifting and drifting away. Too much emotion too fast.

Things used to be, she could wipe the drink from her system like nothing. Things used to be, she remembered to do so _before._ The problem with _after_ was that it had been nearly a year since the last time she trusted herself enough to fall through. Being in the midst of it was like nothing else in the world. Too many nights spent using magic to keep herself afloat on the wave of a buzz. She’d forgotten what it was to give up control, and her mind was all too happy to remind her. A trip down memory lane was the absolute last thing she needed…And yet. “When we get out of here, I want to find her.”

“We will.”

“I don’t blame her anymore,” breathed Rachel, almost a whimper, almost without meaning.

But no answer came.

There was nothing for an eternity, nothing for longer, and so Rachel let go, drifting off into the nothing of drunkenness. It was nerves fading and still entirely too aware, every touch trailing chills, and their absence more so. It was emotion felt through the fog of someone else’s body. It was the way she’d felt with Chloe ever since that first night in their brand new apartment. Her nerves were cold enough to burn, feeling so much, too much, every sensation there was to be felt.

“Hey,” Chloe said, breaking her from the bliss. She was chuckling faintly and somehow still on the precipice of breathlessness. “Hey, that glass was like, barely two shots.”

“Mmh,” Rachel groaned.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you this drunk before, Rach.”

“‘Cause I’m _magic!_ ”

“Uh huh.”

“Magic beats drunk.”

The smallest of gasps choked out of her. _You’re poking at my brain again,_ said her imagined Chloe, and “I see,” said her very real Chloe, and Rachel could hear them both grinning, could hear them both calm, and soft, and completely at ease.

Which was why, when Chloe’s phone chose then to start ringing, they both ignored it. Stubborn hope to stay locked away from the world, to stay lost in that look, and those eyes, and…It almost worked. But the phone rang again and their bubble popped, its essence evaporating in mist too thin to touch. Gone, and gone, and gone. Somewhere beyond the feeling of it all, Chloe was talking, and though Rachel couldn’t quite reach the details, she recognized the shape of every last word being said.

“Diner?” Rachel questioned, barely waiting for her to hang up, already preparing the first stumbling steps on her return trip to sober. If Chloe was leaving, there was no point. She channeled magic through herself like heat flickering to life, like a flame threatening to burn away all, if only it could catch.

Every shift of muscle was more vivid than the last. Fog clearing, waves receding, sensation becoming sensation again.

Chloe cleared her throat. “Carol just heard. I guess some detective showed up asking questions, and that’s…”

Rachel said nothing. She rolled onto her side, burying her face in Chloe’s stomach, wrapping arms tight around her waist.

“She,” mumbled Chloe, unsure. “She wants me over there to help break the news. According to the detective, I’m missing. Got her kinda freaked out.”

An amused half-snort propelled Rachel forward. She dug further into the soft cotton and smooth plastic buttons, into the firm muscle beneath. “Totally missing. Can’t see you.”

“Mhm.”

“Did you tell her? Where you’ve been?”

“I don’t _know_ where I’ve been, this place is…” Chloe said thoughtfully, jokingly, so many feelings at once. “I told her I spent the past couple days with you and she just about passed out in relief. Could feel it through the phone and everything. She says hi, by the way.”

Somehow, some way, Rachel managed to curl further into her. She kept her sense of self firmly to herself, but she sought out touch like life itself, finding as much as she could take and still grasping for more. They needed more time. They needed to leave. Chloe needed to go. She needed to stay.

Rachel didn’t know what to do, and she was about to pull away, to ask whether Chloe would be willing to go then and there — no planning, no packing, no anything but the two of them piling into a stolen truck and driving until they couldn’t drive anymore — when someone rapped their knuckles against the door jamb.

Chloe froze. Rachel could have imagined who it was even before he opened his mouth. The final piece of the mystery, there at last. Chloe _was_ happy. She _was_ relaxed. And yet.

“I hope I’m not interrupting,” her father said, every word perfectly pleasant and perfectly placed. Everything about him the worst kind of fake. “I was hoping to speak with you, Rachel.”

Rachel pushed herself up, not quite to sitting. She was propped against Chloe’s side, hand gripped too far up her thigh half out of spite for her father and half because _and yet, and yet, and yet,_ still continued its relentless echo of desire to see her safe. There was no universe in which his being there meant something good.

Worse, Jakob was stood some three steps behind him, stoic and silent as if he’d never broken away, never gotten better, never saved her life or taught her how to use her strength. It felt wrong. It was wrong. Whatever happened when she was asleep and unaware was turning the air in the room thick enough to choke, and it took everything in her not to reach out and cut through herself.

And, then, she was falling. Behind her, Chloe was supporting her with a palm between her shoulder blades, dipping her low — low enough that she would almost have expected to roll off the edge of the couch had she not felt so supported — and leaning in, leaning further, smiling her radiant smile every step of the way. When Chloe kissed her, it was a show. It was gentle, and tender, and the obnoxious act of someone marking their territory, and Rachel lasted barely two seconds before laughter bubbled up without warning from the pit of her stomach.

Chloe was happy. _She_ was happy. And yet, they were still where they were. They were still stuck in place, and for as long as they were, everything would keep on crumbling, keep on breaking. But Chloe, too, would keep on trying. She might have found a way to be happy anywhere, but Rachel knew more deeply than she ever had before that she would never be okay putting them through a future of empty wishes and unfulfilled promises for nothing but the sake of holding onto that feeling. They were leaving, and they were leaving soon.

“I should head out anyway. The diner’s in shambles without me,” Chloe said, easing her back into place. Not for one solitary second did she attempt to break her gaze. Rachel let herself reach just long enough, just far enough to hear, _I’m not running, I’m still with you,_ before the connection snapped like string. Chloe was there, and then she wasn’t. Gone, but not running; carrying their glasses back to the bar and taking another swig of too-expensive whiskey.

Her father didn’t see, his back turned and gaze still firmly on Chloe, but behind him, Jakob’s mask cracked and made way for a smirk. He grunted his proudest grunt before asking, “You ready, kid?”

“Damn straight, big guy. Let’s go show me how to get out of this five star hellhole.”

Her father didn’t see, too proud to give that much ground, but as they stepped out the door, Jakob clapped one massive hand to Chloe’s shoulder.

Only once they were alone in uncomfortable silence did he speak, fading into the version of himself that still believed, somehow, that he had any right to call himself family. “Are you alright?” he asked, stepping into her personal space and reaching for her throat. “Did she hurt you?”

Rachel swatted his arm away and scrambled further down the sofa, into Chloe’s space, into Chloe’s warmth. For a moment, it almost seemed as if she could feel the lingering traces of her in that presence. An anchor. A light in the dark.

“Don’t act like you care,” she snapped.

That he seemed almost genuinely taken aback was the greatest reward she could have asked for. If only he hadn’t ruined it by opening his mouth again. “If some ordinary girl is causing you harm —”

“Chloe isn’t — don’t use that god damn word. She’s not a problem for you to fix.” The words escaped against her will, dripping with venom like those imagined remnants of Chloe soaking in and taking control. As thankful as she was, she wasn’t in the mood to argue. Not with him, and not over her. She couldn’t imagine it was why her father deigned to leave his office, either. He was trying to get in her head. Something worse was coming.

Except that nothing was coming. He didn’t answer, content with studying her every move.

Without meaning, like some instinct inherent to being watched, Rachel reached up to trace the edges of her bruise. It felt for an instant, for less, like Chloe leading her along.

“Besides,” she said, pads of her fingers following every line of that mottled, purple mark. “She only hurts me when I ask very nicely.”

The disgust he tried and failed to mask only pushed her further. She _hated_ being watched. “Ah.”

“I ask a lot.”

He cleared his throat, putting enough space between them to start pacing. Slow enough that anyone else might not have recognized it as pacing. But she did, because she always did. And when he was finished, close enough to his usual pristine mask of respectability that he was no longer so obviously dealing with the imagery of his daughter getting railed by a nobody to him that meant everything to her, he began again.

She hadn’t wanted — and still half expected — him to try the speech again. The one about avoiding ordinaries, about the importance of their bloodline, and the purity that House heirs must maintain, and whatever other whims he’d taken to following lately, repurposed and rephrased to sound like the centuries old moral system he insisted on living by, on, and on, and on.

Like clockwork, he disappointed her.

 _Be smarter about who you let in,_ his newest take went, _because strength is paramount. We of the Amber and Silver, the Executioners and the Arbiters, the Sword and the Shield,_ and on. And on. And on.

Somewhere in the middle, Rachel wandered her way over to the bar and the whiskey Chloe left behind. She considered pouring a glass for only the slightest of moments before deciding against it, throwing her head back, and chugging her way through what was still left. Every swallow was too much, and her throat strained, her eyes watered, her lungs screamed in protest. She kept on until the last drop was gone.

Her father, somehow, seemed hardly aware she’d moved. But. As the warmth of the drink pulsed through her, dragging her deeper, and deeper, and deeper to the depths of drowning, she found it all just the wrong side of too hard to care.

She missed Chloe. She wanted to be gone. Somewhere her father wasn’t blindly talking her ears off, rambling about _you shouldn’t waste time with ordinaries when we of Amber hold the blood of the Bonded within us,_ like that wasn’t complete nonsense. Somewhere her father wasn’t _watching_ because it made her skin crawl when all she’d ever wanted was to be _seen._ The bond was something from a children’s story. A children’s story no one bothered telling because it was so utterly beyond belief. Rachel flexed her grip. Magic like fire — like _Chloe —_ pulsed through her, gone with the next beat of her heart, but the damage was already done. The whiskey bottle shattered to pieces in her hand.

“Fuck,” she hissed, muscle and tendon caught in a spasm of pain too muffled by liquor to feel.

At least three shards were visibly lodged in her palm, blood pooling slow enough not to matter. She watched it overflow, spill lazy rivers down her wrist and her arm, dripping away to stain the hardwood counter. All that value, all that _extraordinary_ worth, disappearing drop, by drop, by drop. Distantly, she recognized the sound of her father still talking as if nothing had happened, and a thought crystallized.

Lifting her injured hand, she let the gathered blood run off into one of the empty glasses. The sound of blood splattering against glass was like nothing else in the world. Her eyes fell closed with a sigh, and she picked the glass up slow, hefting it once and twice, just enough force to let it hover weightless in the grip of her palm. Just enough force to feel the weight of it. Red clung to the sides, unwilling to join the dark pool of liquid beneath.

She threw it as hard as she could at her father’s head. It barely missed, but the splattered mess of bloodstain it left after shattering against his shoulder was satisfaction enough.

~*~

Pulling the glass out was easy. Stitching her own palm, less so.

But that was how it always went, the bathroom sink always a mess of blood spatter, hand towels, and broken sutures after one of their _talks_. If nothing else, Jakob would be proud she’d managed not to maim herself any further given the amount of whiskey still in her system. The magic could mask it, run her nerves into white hot overdrive in an attempt to forget it, but it was still there. She could barely stand straight.

Miraculously, she had enough clarity in her to claw a path back to her room, even managing to stay steady just long enough to collapse into the mattress. Small victories.

There were bandages somewhere in her end table drawer, and she needed badly to wrap her hand up, but what she _wanted_ was a break. The room was spinning, that endless expanse shimmering with something she might have called concern were she anywhere closer to sober. In her state, the word _condescending_ seemed far more fitting. It took everything in her to keep from falling over even sprawled out flat on her back. She managed one slow and unsteady breath. The feeling in her gut ensured that she didn’t dare try another.

“What the hell did he say this time?” a voice like the aftermath of a fistfight between gravel and asphalt asked from somewhere nearer the door.

Rachel barked out a laugh, or maybe a wheeze. Or maybe a bark. She wasn’t in any position to decide which, so instead, she raised her injured hand and grumbled out something that might have sounded close enough to, “Drawer.”

Jakob didn’t go to the drawer. At least, not right away, instead shuffling over for the mostly unused plastic trash can she’d had sitting sitting in the corner for who-knew-how-long.

“Sit,” he demanded, placing it next to her bed.

She obeyed. But she didn’t have the slightest idea why he’d asked. At least, for one blissfully ignorant second, she didn’t. Because in the next, he pressed an index finger to the center of her forehead and she understood even before the stomach roiling cold sweat inducing wave of nausea rushed through her what was coming.

In the slowly disappearing fragments of time before burying her head in the — admittedly, very helpful — trash can, she even managed to growl out a perfectly eloquent, “ _Asshole._ ”

After some time, Jakob pulled up what might have been a chair, and sat. It all passed in flashes of color. Rachel was trapped in the midst of it, death itself the only thing she could feel until a neatly folded towel draped across her shoulders. She tugged it closer.

“Boss didn’t want Chloe hanging around any longer.”

Rachel didn’t answer.

So, he continued. “She’s safe. No one hurt her. Trust that I’ll keep that promise, kid.”

“I know you will,” Rachel said. Jakob opened his mouth, but she silenced him with a glare. They’d made that promise so long ago that it barely still seemed real. He hadn’t protected her from a single thing. The world didn’t work that way. Chloe was gone, and Rachel was not. There was nothing left to say. She gripped the towel tighter. “I know you will.”

The wrapping, when Jakob finally took her injured palm into his own massive paws, was slow. Tedious. Over, and under, and around, and again. If Rachel were capable, she’d have accused him of pulling everything too tight as his way of calling her an idiot. But the only words he spoke, leaning away as she stumbled back to the bathroom sink in search of water, weren’t an explanation, or an admonishment, or even a threat. They were, “What are you still doing here?”

“Drinking,” she said, shouted, slurred, cupping her one good hand under the faucet and splashing herself close enough to clean. What was she doing? Hell if she knew. She threw another handful of water at her face.

When it became clear enough she wasn’t planning to answer further, Jakob moved himself to the doorway. His reflection stood in the mirror, features softening more than Rachel had ever seen from him, more than she ever thought possible from him, and for one fleeting moment, she recognized the look in his eyes: fear. Fear for her. Fear for Chloe.

She tore her gaze away and brought her hand to rest against the counter. What was she doing? She didn’t know.

“Come with me,” Jakob said, his reflection still unmoving, still patient. “I’ve got one last thing to teach you.”

Rachel breathed in through her nostrils. She coughed. “You say that like you’re the one going somewhere.”

The joke died, burned from the air the moment Jakob’s only response was to grunt agreeably. He _was_ going somewhere. When Rachel looked, he was already leaving. She followed. There was no question in it. She followed.

The walls pulsed, almost as unsure as she felt, and she didn’t dare speak, worried whatever was happening might stop if she tried. Halls passed like tens of hundreds of mirror images. They didn’t speak. Not until they reached the painfully familiar set of doors perched comfortably at the end. The doors were lined in gold, sprawling almost too high to measure, and as they drew closer, Jakob paused. He studied her, eyes too hard, too cold. Rachel hated being watched.

 _One last chance,_ he meant. But Rachel held her ground. And he knew she would.

Jakob nodded. He flattened a palm against the doors, shoving them open like they weighed nothing at all. He didn’t so much as wait for her father to open his mouth before demanding, “The Silver House kid. Nathan Prescott. Talk.”

Her father’s expression turned to steel. The walls trembled, nearly shook, and no one seemed to notice but her. It may as well have been invisible in the face of the animosity filling the room, and so Rachel pushed it all aside, ignored it as best she could.

Silver House, was…Truthfully, she didn’t know much of anything about Silver House. They were the only house that hadn’t taken the name of their magic.

The Prescott name came up once or twice when she was still in art school, and her father had been more and more vocal about their existence in the last year of speeches, but the people of Silver House themselves? They were more secretive than _her_ family. The only writings Amber House seemed to keep had been locked away with the rest of the fairy tales about old magic.

The shaking grew more intense, and still no one noticed but her. What was she doing? She didn’t know. But that needed to change.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> there are so many moving more moving parts in this fic than i am used to writing and it is only thanks to the magical powers of Outlining that i have made it this far
> 
> also, thanks so much to everyone leaving kudos and comments, i love hearing from you all!


	8. Chloe

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“Am I_ right, _Chlo?” Rachel had called somewhere toward the start of the third waffle, as if she hadn’t dipped her voice low enough not to be heard for full minutes before._
> 
> _“Fuckin’ A,” Chloe called back, deadpan. “That sure is whatever you’re on about.”_
> 
> _“Damn right!” Rachel yelled, and laughed, pulling Max along with her._

Dragging a hand through her hair was never going to be enough to keep Chloe awake. She tried anyway.

To her right, intersections stretching off into a horizon, faded hazy gold beneath streetlights. The fluorescents behind her obscured most of them. She could still hear top-forty radio playing faintly through the glass door. To her left, a string of businesses closed for the day. And one on the corner that wasn’t.

Most of the time, its sign read _Two Whales Diner,_ but the rust, and the dents, and the damage from nothing but time had left the lights unable to shine anything more than _To Wa r_ overnight. The front door was propped open, leaking chatter like comfort into the dark. Slowly, Chloe exhaled. She looked at the fresh pack of cigarettes and the lighter still gripped in her hands, and she turned right. She ducked down the first alley she found, already halfway through shredding the pack open and shoving a cigarette between her lips, already lit before she sucked in her first breath, already nearly gone before she started sinking against the wall.

Her life was easier when she didn’t need to think about it. Being near Rachel made all of it easier. Even the magic.

~*~

Barely three steps into the diner, Chloe was being swept off her feet in a bone crushing hug.

Carol was small, five feet tall on a good day, but she was _strong_ — could-easily-deadlift-Chloe-three-times-over strong — and, during…Everything, the death, the falling apart, and even Joyce’s second marriage, she was there.

The diner staff had always been something of a revolving door of found family, but Carol was the constant. She was there from the beginning, a sister to Joyce and an aunt to Chloe without truly being either.

Her grip went tighter and she groaned with some played up effort for show, voice raspy and deep. The handful of late-night regulars still hanging around laughed, but judging by the stiffness in their smiles, they had heard the news some time ago.

“We’ve been so worried,” Carol said as she lowered Chloe back to the ground. “It’s good to see you’re okay.”

Chloe sighed, guiltily wringing out the back of her neck. _She_ was okay, but… “Yeah. Thank Rach for that one.”

“Don’t we always. Oh, I’m so glad you have that girl in your life.”

As Carol spoke, one of the two customers at the far end of the bar flailed and fell out of their seat. They were — both of them, Chloe realized — unfamiliar faces. The farthest of the two was too rich, too groomed, and dressed entirely too well to be sitting in a diner that sold burnt coffee twenty-four hours a day and had a middle-of-the-night menu amounting to _burgers, chicken, or fries._ He barely looked human.

The closer one was a more open sort of disaster. His nose was broken and bandaged and his right eye was bruised so purple it looked nearly black, the entire thing spilling across to his ear. He carried himself with the air of a stretched-out baby in a suit that would never fit. Or some kind of purse dog. _Lost composure_ didn’t begin to cover it.

“Hi,” he said, not putting the slightest effort toward dispelling the mental image of a chihuahua drowning in a blazer. He slicked back his hair with one hand, but it barely accomplished anything. “Hi. Hi. Chloe Price? I’m Warren Graham. I’m a detective with the forty-f — no, wait, backing up, I have a few questions.”

“A detective.”

“Yes. Yeah. That’s me. I have questions. For you.”

“Uh… _Huh._ Do you have, like, a badge or something? It’s not often the big guns get called in to bother me over something I didn’t do, I want to savor this,” Chloe asked.

Carol and the regulars laughed. “Lost it, if you can believe it! Was in the middle of throwing him out when Darryl managed to find him on the Internet,” she offered, jabbing a thumb back toward the mustache in a suit in one of the far booths. “He’s for real as far as anyone can tell, so we’ve humored him this long.”

Chloe sighed, or coughed, or chortled, her eyes shut and her ability to decide which noise she’d made lost somewhere in that bit of information. “Any chance you’re the detective Jakob warned me about? Big-ass boulder of a guy, about yea big.”

Rather than give a height, she pointed vaguely toward the ceiling.

The detective sputtered, furious. “Jakob _Murton?_ That man assaulted an officer of the law, if you know where he’s hiding —”

“Yeah, okay, you’re that one,” Chloe said, then presented her hands as if asking to be cuffed. “What am I being blamed for this time, officer?”

The detective’s confusion painted him in an almost professional light for the few short seconds before he opened his mouth.

“You aren’t in trouble,” he said, then added, “ _Yet._ This is about the incident at —”

“The _murder,_ ” Carol corrected. The regulars loudly, angrily, agreed.

“…The murder. I think your family is at the center of something big, and I was hoping you might be able to clear up some of the details for me. Have you ever heard of an organization called Amb —”

“Oh, for,” Carol said, one hand dragging down her face. “This nonsense again? You said you had real questions to ask. Either ask them or get out, because if I have to listen to you drag Rachel’s name through the mud _again,_ I can promise you’re not leaving with only one black eye.”

“Ma’am, is that a threat?” The detective asked, trying and failing to muffle a wince as he reached for a gun that wasn’t there. His friend at the bar chose then to join in.

“Thank you for your time. We’ll get out of your hair now,” he said, speaking with the authority of someone twice his age. Entirely too calm and entirely too smooth. He was already moving to shuffle the detective out the door. As the two of them passed, he placed a gentle hand on Chloe’s shoulder. “Chloe Price. It’s so good to finally meet you.”

His touch was like ice, and before Chloe could react, the whole of him shifted and changed. Fragments like pieces of a massive puzzle phased in and out of existence in involuntary twitches. He looked unstable, white noise static ripping him apart at the seams. It was unsettlingly close to the sensation she’d had around the walls in that not-quite-hotel, like she might be able reach straight through and fall forever.

As his hand fell away, the vision did too. Chloe counted her breaths until the door clicked shut behind him. Before, she might have dismissed it as a trick of the light, of the sun, of the moon, of hunger, or sleep deprivation, or even the fact that her brain was still crawling its way out of a sex cocoon.

But that was before. Magic was real, and no one had actually bothered to explain what that meant. Or what it would mean for her to know. Anything was possible.

Chloe sighed. All of it was easier with Rachel.

“Glad I took time out of my day for that,” she mumbled under her breath, lips pressed in a thin line.

Carol looked inches from slapping her across the side of the head. “Well, since you _are_ here, go sit. I’ll fix you up something good for bothering to let us know you’re still alive.”

Just as Chloe opened her mouth to protest, something moved. Brown, and blue, and freckles, sitting in one of the booths.

One very specific booth, actually. The same one as ever, the same seat as ever — the outside corner where the seafoam green and white striped vinyl had begun to peel and only been mostly repaired, where _Max + Chloe 4evr_ still sat carved into wood — like no time had passed at all. Her hair was shorter, barely past chin-length, but she looked, somehow, the same as she always had. Ten years of nightmares come to life.

“Max,” Chloe whispered. Beside her, Carol sucked a sharp breath through her teeth.

Max sank entire inches down in her seat. When she answered, she sounded like every bad dream imaginable. “Hey, Chloe.”

“What,” tried Chloe, choked off by something she couldn’t name beyond the hope that it existed somewhere close to rage. She stepped up to the booth and the world faded away. “What are you doing here?”

“Um. Carol called me,” Max explained, hesitant, walking on glass as if that was at all what Chloe meant. _What are you doing here after ten years of radio silence?_ Seconds passed like years before she finally seemed to realize, finally had the decency to look embarrassed over missing the point, her cheeks splotching pink and red, sinking a line straight past the collar of her terrible graphic tee.

Letting her explain felt like admitting defeat, so Chloe pressed further.

“So, — so Carol called you _today,_ and you dropped everything to get here from Seattle in…” She pulled out her phone without really looking, gaze lingering a beat longer than necessary on nothing at all before continuing. “In less than three hours? You must be some kind of magic.”

“Ah,” said Max, somewhere between a groan and a squeak. “I’ve…Been in New York for a few weeks now. I have a work thing.”

“A work thing,” Chloe exhaled, testing the words on her tongue.

“And, I couldn’t figure out what to say, and I didn’t want to bother you. It’s…A colleague and I have an art exhibit. I — I’m actually a pretty good photographer these days.”

“Christ, and here I thought _I_ was an asshole after leaving Rachel alone tonight. Thank you, Max, for informing me than I am a literal saint.”

“Chloe —”

“Just…Don’t.”

Chloe’s hands clenched into fists. She loosened her grip and flexed it again, over, and over, and over, digging crescent marks into her palms as her breathing leveled out. She tapped the backs of her knuckles on the carving and took off for Joyce’s office without another word.

A younger Chloe, a less evolved Chloe, a Chloe that hadn’t just learned rapid fire that her not-quite-estranged, not-quite-loved mother had been murdered in cold blood, that her stepfather was involved in some freaky supernatural supervillain nonsense, and that her girlfriend was almost definitely a real life evil Disney princess might not have so easily controlled the indignation.

Luckily, Chloe was not those things. Because she had learned those things. She was better, she was smarter, because she’d had to be for Rachel’s sake. She buried down the voice in the back of her head yelling _don’t let her get away with that_ like it wasn’t even there. Max being back meant absolutely nothing.

~*~

When exactly she’d calmed enough to head back out front, Chloe wasn’t sure. Truthfully, when exactly she’d made it to Two Whales in the first place was about as much of a mystery. It was late then, and only getting later, the regulars slowly trickling out until no one remained but Carol and Max. They were chatting away about memories of Joyce, about times they seemed to think were happy enough to warrant the nostalgia. Rose tinted glass, Chloe supposed. Mostly, the two of them had avoided her entirely.

There were attempts. At first. But the third time someone showed up in the back office politely suggesting she come out to eat, Chloe snapped, and the wood paneling gained a new crack. She’d stayed there once they finally got the message, pretending her way through productivity until she was somewhere closer to calm.

And once she was, she confined herself to the space behind the bar. Counting the money in the register helped. Emptying her mind of everything but the tedium of repetitive movement distracted from the knowledge that Max was there, still, shooting guilty glances her way nearly every other sentence. Exactly like she always used to.

That slow simmer of familiarity was exactly how Chloe noticed the change. Something new, and intense, and safe brushed up against the edge of her awareness. It was gentleness condensed into the flash of an instant. It was an unintentional touch along her lips from the nothingness of air so oblivious it even _tasted_ accidental. The absentminded intimacy of years. Chloe looked to the street, hoping to find the source, but there was nothing to see and less to feel.

Confused — and still more than curious — she returned to her work. But the rush came again, stronger, filling her mind like countless wisps of light; an ease and a peace she knew like the back of her hand, touching and curling through her. The front door swung open, and Chloe dug teeth into the backs of her lips, trying futilely to bite down her grin at the warmth tangling down the thread of her every nerve.

She’d _thought_ touch was the core of it; things had definitely seemed that way during their time together in bed. But the open door brought another wave, and she knew she would have recognized that feeling anywhere.

“Well _howdy,_ darlin’” Rachel drawled, leaning across the counter.

“Hey,” Chloe said, halfway to a cheer and still without looking up from the last few dollar bills of work. “She finally got the accent! Round of applause for the rich girl.”

She didn’t clap or make a show of it, and neither Carol or Max join in, not that Chloe had expected them to. What she _had_ expected was exactly what happened: Rachel circling the counter without another word, hoping to join her, to touch her, to be closer, and closer, and closer. Chloe looked up, hoping to catch a smile, and —

“Rach,” she choked, suddenly breathless, and snatched at Rachel’s wrist just above the bandages. “What the hell happened to your hand?”

That, at least, pulled a response from the booth.

“Her _hand?_ ” Carol shrieked, jolting to her feet and unsettling the table enough that the wobbling continued for whole seconds. “What about her throat? Or her back? She’s bleeding! Lord Almighty, girl, what son of a bitch hurt you?”

Seconds passed like eternity, and Rachel made no attempt to break Chloe’s gaze. She tucked a few stray strands of hair behind her ears and raised her uninjured hand to Chloe’s cheek. Relaxation spread from her touch, smoothing over every last frayed edge of worry.

A too-small grin curved at the corners of Rachel’s mouth, and she tilted her head barely to the side, gaze still unbroken, the hazel between of green and gold growing brighter and brighter, impossible colors and impossible light trapping Chloe in a trance.

“It’s fine,” Rachel said just loud enough to carry. She shrugged, smoother than water. “I’m okay. Too much to drink.”

There should have been more. But Chloe was utterly speechless, frozen to the core and too warm with ease to move, and so when Rachel leaned the full of her weight forward, burying her face in the fabric of her shirt and wrapping arms tight around her waist, she let it happen. When Rachel pressed insistently at her mind, Chloe let her in. Her every sense was flooded. It was more forceful, more intense, more thorough than anything she’d come to know, and her legs trembled under the pressure.

At least, until the sound of Carol clearing her throat yanked them both back to reality.

Chloe pulled back just far enough to meet Rachel’s gaze with a low, throaty chuckle. “Tell me what happened.”

“I saw a rat run off with someone’s food and thought of you,” Rachel deflected. On any other day it might really have been the case.

“Funny. You know what I mean.”

“I do.”

“…And?”

“Go make me some waffles. I want to share embarrassing stories about you with Carol loud enough that you’ll still hear us the whole time,” Rachel said, pushing straight past the question.

Chloe knew better than to keep trying. She would explain when she wanted. If she wanted.

“Make some for yourself while you’re at it,” Carol chimed in, still on her feet and clutching at the table. “I’ll let you have your stupid little pity party over Max, but you’re not leaving without food.”

“Wait,” Rachel blurted, shoving herself completely away and whirling on the counter, locking onto Max like seeing an old friend for the first time in years. “Max? Like, _Max_ Max? Your Max?”

Max’s answering nod seemed more automatic than anything, lizard brain fear taking control while the rest of her processed. Same as ever. Same as always.

Before Rachel could sneak out of reach completely, Chloe grabbed her again by the wrist. She didn’t speak, didn’t ask, didn’t open her mouth at all.

“Nothing happened,” Rachel whispered, the whole of her easing just slightly once realization fell into place. She stepped confidently back into Chloe’s space, all placating touches and gentle half-smiles as she stretched up onto the balls of her feet, and Chloe knew she would believe any lie Rachel told her so long as she did it looking like _that_. “I’m fine. We’re fine. It’s all fine. I missed you, that’s all.”

 _See,_ Rachel thought, their minds bleeding back into connection as Chloe’s fingers danced the length of her bandaged palm, _I’m okay._

 _Let me show you,_ she continued, reaching out to maintain contact for just that much longer, _you have nothing to worry about._

When Rachel brought their foreheads together, when Rachel ghosted her lips over the place Chloe wanted them most, when Rachel kissed her, it was like being anywhere else. No audience, no Max, no anyone but them, nothing but bodies and souls fit perfectly, flawlessly together for countless blissful seconds.

Vertigo flooded Chloe’s veins as they pulled apart and the connection snapped, and she was still busy collecting herself by the time Rachel slid into the booth, already soothing Carol back down, and already plucking tiny meaningless truths from Max as easy as touch.

“Right,” Chloe muttered under her breath. “Waffles.”

The prep was easy. The waiting was…Rachel. Entire conversations of nothing for no reason but to replace the silence with each other. Every minute littered with absentminded bickering through the kitchen window. Every word lined with bright smiles and brighter eyes. Every secret glance caught too soon to be secret.

 _“Am I_ right, _Chlo?” Rachel had called somewhere toward the start of the third waffle, as if she hadn’t dipped her voice low enough not to be heard for full minutes before._

_“Fuckin’ A,” Chloe called back, deadpan. “That sure is whatever you’re on about.”_

_“Damn right!” Rachel yelled, and laughed, pulling Max along with her._

By the time she made it back out with Rachel’s food, enough time had passed that even Carol was gone, more than convinced things were safe thanks to Rachel. A wink, and a touch, and an empty nothing — _I’ll make sure she gets something to eat, don’t you worry, Mama_ — was all it ever seemed to take.

Max though…Max was still there.

Against her better judgment, Chloe slid into the booth opposite them both, dropping her chin into a palm. There was something frustratingly comforting in watching Rachel work her magic — literal or figurative, she still wasn’t sure — on _Max_ of all people _._

Though, Max’s tattoo doused that feeling in ice fast enough to forget she’d ever felt it. The silhouette of a rose detailed with blank space and haloed in dark sprouted from the veins at her wrist so smoothly that the ink seemed almost an extension of her.

“That…” Chloe said breathlessly. Without thinking, she reached and brushed the pads of her fingers over the lines of it. The delayed reaction of Max’s fingers twitching up and brushing against her own wrist went almost unnoticed.

“It’s nothing next to yours,” Max said, glancing at the vines threaded down Chloe’s exposed forearms. “I got this because of…”

Max’s voice stirred up a gust within her. A rush, like every sense amplified for the length of her words and not one second more. It was like Rachel, but not. Less intimacy, less warmth, less _Rachel,_ really. It was as if Max’s intent had gained presence; ideas and promise carried on the weight of wind caressing her heart.

It was magic.

Chloe cleared her throat.

“My dad,” she said, too small. Too confused. She knew that feeling, even if the core of it was changed. Even if the core of it was _Max_. She had known that feeling long before either of them. “My dad had that tattoo.”

Rachel was watching her like she did sometimes; thoughtful, quiet, brows knit together and lips pressed tight as if every facet of every expression even Chloe couldn’t feel was clearer than day.

She swallowed. Her tongue felt too thick. Her throat felt too dry. She pushed out of the booth.

~*~

“Max is gone. We closed up for you,” Rachel announced, leaning lazily against the office door. It could have been minutes later. It could have been hours. Her lips were curved up in the sort of apologetic smile she only ever put on when she was embarrassed, eyes shining with every inch of hard-fought effort to dial it all back. “You need to forgive her for being too shy to reach out, she is precious.”

Chloe said nothing, elbows resting on bouncing knees and a recently emptied glass of the not-so-secret gin in Joyce’s desk cradled in both hands.

“So,” Rachel started again, calmer, and lower, and slow. “What’s a girl like me have to do to take a girl like you back home?”

“Too tired,” Chloe said, placing the glass safely off to the side and leaning into the back of the old couch. “And confused.”

“Hmm?”

Chloe exhaled sharply through her nostrils. Her legs started bouncing again. “If it was just Max, whatever. I’d be up for it. But she is the second magic douchebag I’ve met today. Do you guys have a word? Magicians? Wizards?”

“…Magicians. Got it in one.” The fondness in Rachel’s voice was suffocating.

It meant something that she hadn’t corrected the accusation; that she hadn’t asked to know who else Chloe suspected. It meant something that Chloe absolutely did not want to confront until it couldn’t be put off any longer.

And it hung heavy between them, thick enough to keep them trapped forever were they anyone else, anyone weaker. It hurt, and it strained at her lungs to speak, the pinprick force of thousands of needles piercing her chest from the inside out and scraping up her throat, but Chloe willed herself to break free, to return to something at least slightly more normal. “You sure? I had a few more ideas. Druids. Mages. Witches.”

“Hmm.”

“Sorceresses.”

“Ohh,” Rachel said, laughing quiet and breathy, moving steadily closer. Step by step by step. “I like that one. Makes me sound _powerful._ ”

“Thought you would. C’mere and watch me sleep,” Chloe said, blindly gesturing her closer until Rachel slid into her lap, slotting against her perfectly, like always, like forever.

Rachel’s smile pressed to the underside of her jaw with a low hum. “I might need some convincing, first,” she lied, and Chloe flexed her hands at Rachel’s waist.

It sparked something to life within her, a searing white-hot flare pouring out through old scar tissue and bleeding into her lungs. She hadn’t _wanted_ to confront the silence, the moment, but the look in Rachel’s eyes was hope that she would, burning every bit as bright.

“Max’s tattoo means something, doesn’t it,” was all she could find the strength to ask, because she was selfish enough to want, but not enough to demand. Not from Rachel. Not about…

Chloe’s heart sank when Rachel nodded.

But then Rachel was taking her face into her hands, helping her back to the surface, thumbs sweeping her cheeks like she was already desperately in need of a chance to reacquaint herself with each and every line. Every desperate nameless something banging against the back of Chloe’s ribs faded slowly away. She leaned forward and rest her forehead against Rachel’s.

Magic was real, and Rachel was magic, and Max was magic, and that tattoo _meant_ something even before her dad went and abandoned them all to the hell they were stuck in. She dug her nails into the soft skin of Rachel’s thighs.

The only thing in the world she wanted anymore was to forget. To feel, to exist, to _be_ with her; to be given the chance to fall in headfirst, sinking under like soaring through the stars, through entire solar systems of emotion until the morning came to force them apart. But she couldn’t bring herself to ask.

She did, however, reach out. Like she’d tried that morning by the pool. Like she’d learned pressed to Rachel’s body sure even the slightest fall further would meld them together for eternity. She sent her thoughts out, forward, and deeper, knowing it would never work because she _still_ wasn’t asking, knowing nothing would ever happen because Rachel was the one who —

Rachel sucked in a breath, shuddering on the exhale and shoving herself back forcefully enough to go tumbling onto the floor.

“Chlo,” she whispered, or maybe thought, one leg still stuck in Chloe’s lap and her other curled up at her side.

Chloe opened her eyes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> stuff! happening!!


	9. Jakob

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I’m gonna need to shoot that brat at some point,” he said.
> 
> Some sort of strangled cough signaled Steph’s escape from her thoughts. “Please don’t."

Jefferson’s was never a well-known restaurant. It was the point, really, that it never became more than a barely functioning front on some empty back street. People came in or they didn’t, they had a minor brush with magic or they didn’t, but either way, they never came back.

Most of the lights were off when Jakob entered, morning sun bleeding in through gauzy curtains and casting the dining area in a peaceful off-grey.

The kitchen however, was brightly lit, disturbing the greyscale stillness enough to reveal the dark forest green of the walls. The floor was a yellowing mess of broken tilework. Just beyond the doors, a conversation could be heard in muffled fits and starts. One deep-voiced man, and another, smaller, unsteady, and angry.

Quietly, Jakob walked deeper inside. Sets of poorly maintained wooden chairs speckled with peeling teal upholstery were stacked neatly on tables to his right. The bar to his left was more of the same. It had the appearance of a place not used recently, but regularly.

“I asked you to do one _very specific thing,_ ” the smaller voice said, coming into stark clarity as Jakob neared the end of the bar. He circled around to the other side in search of a drink to pair with the show.

“But boss —” the larger man started, cut off before he could finish. Someone’s fist made contact with someone’s face.

The younger voice continued, every few words punctuated by another blow. “I did _not_ ask you to do your very best. You don’t get an A for effort; you get to _keep_ your job for _doing_ your job.”

Tucked away on one of the shelves behind the counter, Jakob found a bottle of very cheap vodka. He gathered together two soap scum lined glasses and took a seat at the table in the center of the room, eyes never leaving the kitchen door.

He poured two very tall shots. He drank only one.

Something ceramic clattered to the floor somewhere in the kitchen.

“Get up,” the younger voice commanded.

Seconds later, Nathan Prescott shoved his way out, dressed in two pieces of a very expensive three-piece suit and wiping at his nose with the backs of his bloodied knuckles. He looked cut from jagged glass: sharp features on a sharp build, and short hair turned messy, only mostly still contained by the shell of styling product. Deep red smeared across his face. Neither he nor the two large men flanking him seemed bothered by that, or that Jakob had already made himself at home.

“Jakob Murton!” Prescott said almost cheerfully, almost genuinely, and smiled a shaky, crackling sort of smile. As he pulled the chair opposite Jakob to the ground, his features stuttered for an instant with all the unstable force of radio static. The sight vanished the moment he sat, and he reached for the shot still left untouched, downing it like water.

Jakob smirked a false satisfaction and poured them both another. “Nathan Prescott.”

“I’m glad you’re here, Jakob Murton. I was —” Prescott began again, stopped short by a very injured man stumbling bodily out of the kitchen. Prescott sighed deeply and worked through his next shot with a grimace and a shallow cough. “One moment,” he said, and stood.

“Boss, I just —” the man wheezed. He wasn’t given the chance to say more; one flick of Prescott’s wrist had him stumbling for two short steps before dropping like a sack of meat into a nearby table. The taste of the air went stale, acrid.

Prescott coughed. He wiped his nose again, his hand suffering another wave of that unsettling static as he pulled it back. “Again with this. What did I tell you? _Get up._ Did I tell you to do anything else? Did I tell you to interrupt my very important conversation?”

The man spoke, barely, wet gurgling noises in the shape of a word. “ _Boss._ ”

For a lengthy moment, there was nothing but the continued sounds of choking. Prescott pinched the bridge of his nose in frustration.

“Honestly, if you can’t answer a simple question,” he said, finally. “I don’t know why I’m keeping you around.”

Another flick of his wrist and the man flexed his every muscle in pain, one second, two seconds, three, four, five before going limp. The two others who had until then stayed uninvolved, moved with all the silent efficiency of experts to carry the body back through the kitchen.

“Fun trick,” Jakob said. He threw back his second shot.

He was on dangerous ground, but seeing a firsthand demonstration certainly saved him the trouble of needing to ask. Silver House magic was many things — methods and techniques of information extraction fitting for a family that so frequently played judge and jury to Amber House’s executioner — but it was not that.

If anything, the little show stank of Amber House magic. Which meant Prescott knew something.

The question, then, was why he thought the display necessary, why he didn’t seem to mind that Jakob had seen. Was he angling for something? Was he assuming a yes before any offer had been made?

Was he an idiot?

Prescott spun on his heels, bounced back to his cheery self from moments before as he crossed back to the table. “Isn’t it? My old coven did manage to teach me a few things before we went our separate ways.”

Jakob grunted, giving nothing away. There was no _going separate ways_ involved. Every single member of that coven lost their lives slow. It happened in the most meticulously orchestrated act of arson he’d ever seen. But then, Prescott would have known that much.

Gauging the reaction, then.

Unbidden, an old mantra drifted to the front of Jakob’s mind. _I have killed, but I am not a killer._

Calm as he could manage, he asked, “Oh?”

“One little rock, and it’s like all of my senses being opened up,” Prescott said, dropping the act, the false authority mimicked from somewhere else in his life, and stretched out his fingers in front of him. They, too, grew unstable at the lines. “Real third eye, seventh sense type shit. Can you believe, Mark Jefferson — king asshole in a mob full of assholes — he had this whole song and dance he liked to give the new girls. Sometimes the boys, too. It was always about _lost innocence_ or something, with him,” and here Prescott laughed, almost giggled, under his breath. He let his voice drop voice several notches deeper, several notches smoother.

A new act. A new mimic. “ _Covens are a family bonded by forces stronger than blood, and I promise you, if you place your trust in me, together we will explore the very limits of what that connection means.”_

Jakob cleared his throat. “Hmm.”

“Like I said: total asshole. He had something phenomenal here, and he only ever used it to…And he made _all_ of us use it to…” Nathan went on, and trailed off. “But then I started taking more, because _I_ realized the potential. It was his own fault, really; he always thought too small.”

“And you? You think bigger?”

“I really do, Jakob Murton!”

Jakob narrowed his eyes. The two silent men returned, taking up position on either side of the kitchen door.

“Beside the point, though. I wanted to talk to you about something,” Prescott said. The mask of unearned bravado slipped back into place.

“Chloe Price,” Jakob replied.

“No,” Prescott said. He rose slowly to his feet and began pacing. “No, that’s not it. Though, thank you for mentioning that name. I let myself forget.”

“You called me to insist that we talk about Chloe Price,” Jakob repeated. The air was saturated with the ozone tinge of short instants before lightning. “If that’s not why I’m here —”

Prescott’s voice fell rough and sharp, and he waved his hand dismissively in Jakob’s direction, coughing on the rebound. “No,” he said. “Stay there. Give me a second, it’ll come to me.”

At first, Jakob felt nothing more than a faint tingle against the ends of his nerves.

It hit him all at once. Every inch as unstable as the rest of Prescott’s body language, a pulsating force of magic pinned him to the chair with crackling, shredding force; movement against the will of every muscle in his body. Magic like jaws clamped shut. He couldn’t fight it.

All he could do was watch as Prescott turned to glare at one of the men near the kitchen, gesturing for them to come closer. A paper was exchanged, unfolded, and for a single blissful moment, Prescott read.

And then he stopped.

“Do you think I need a fucking _note_ to remember these things?” he shouted. Another flare of blurred static pulsed through him from head to toe, and in the space of a blink he threw a punch.

The wet _crack_ of contact signaled the end of the spell on Jakob; he gulped air back into his lungs as quietly as he could, unsure how long the whole of Prescott’s energy would stay redirected. Finding out wasn’t a particularly enticing idea.

Prescott threw another punch, the air audibly crackling with energy and the silent man held on his feet by an unseen force.

“An Uber ride from what we assume is Amber House to some shitty neighborhood in the South Bronx at nine,” he said, calm despite the effort behind his continuing blows against the man’s face. His knuckles came away bloodier and bloodier each time. Somewhere nearby, glass popped. “From nine forty to ten, nothing.” Another punch. “For five minutes at ten, a liquor store!” Another. Prescott’s voice grew closer to a roar with every word. “The next hour, a convenience store three lots down!” Another. The man was barely still breathing.

Another. Bone crunched beneath Prescott’s fist, and the man finally, finally dropped to the floor.

Prescott stopped, breathing barely harder than normal and yet barely still conscious. He turned sleepily, his arms and his head lolling back and the rest of him arching just slightly to follow.

Too much to be the drink catching up to him.

The effects of that magic on his system, Jakob realized.

Registering, or maybe just acknowledging that Jakob was still there, Prescott continued, “After that, she wandered for another half hour or so, and apparently had some kind of panic attack in an alley before arriving at Two Whales Diner, where she stayed for most of the night. Terrible coffee. Tell me, Jakob Murton, does it sound like I need a note to remember? Do you think I need a note to describe the disgust on her face when I touched her?”

Jakob watched the man lie unmoving on the floor. The crackling in the air subsided steadily, but the sickly taste, the wrongness of it, did not.

“Jakob Murton, I asked you a question.”

“That was Chloe’s night you described.” A beat passed, Jakob said nothing more. He waited for a response, but none came. “You said this isn’t about her.”

“It _isn’t!_ ” Prescott hissed, scrambling back to his feet. His eyes flickered a pale off-yellow that felt every inch as unsettling as the taste lingering in the air. “This — all of it — is about Rachel Amber! The future of our Houses is at stake, and I would think _you,_ who practically run Amber House, of _all_ people would —”

The front door slammed open. Prescott paled immediately at the sight, eyes widening with childish guilt. When Jakob turned to look, he saw nothing but an unremarkable man, no older than sixty, in an unremarkable suit. He was pudgy. He was harmless. He was angry.

“Nathan,” he said, and the full picture snapped sharply into view. The father. Jakob knew of the meetings between Amber and Silver Houses, but not of the man. “Prescott.”

“Yes,” the kid answered, smaller than he’d sounded even once since Jakob’s arrival.

“Excuse your guest. You’ve made a mess of things; we need to talk.”

“Yes.”

Nathan gestured Jakob to the door, not looking up, not speaking, a child waiting to know the punishment for their tantrum.

Jakob left.

Outside, the air was fresh.

Outside, Jakob could breathe.

Outside, Steph stepped out of the alley to the side of the restaurant. She brushed the backs of her knuckles to his wrist, a second wave of nausea breaking against him just as the first began to recede.

Jakob took exactly two steps before vomiting.

~*~

“So,” Steph said, rolling her shoulders and leaning back in her seat.

Before ducking into some dimly lit place just opening for the day, they’d circled for several blocks. Someone had started tailing them the moment they left. It seemed, truthfully, beyond anything Nathan Prescott might have been able to orchestrate on his own, and his father _seemed_ uninterested, but appearances never meant a thing. Safety was safety. Doubly so after what Jakob had just sat through.

So they circled. And they hid. And they ate. Steph had ordered enough food for three, brushing off the raised eyebrow with a quick hand gesture and a, _we’re both too old for lectures about metabolism, let me have this._ Jakob satisfied himself with a glass of water.

“So,” he answered. “Jefferson.”

She hummed her agreement around a mouthful of food. “I’ve been trying to remember why that name sounds so familiar. Beyond the Prescott situation, I mean.”

“Mhm.”

“It was…Maybe fifteen, sixteen years ago by now? I got thrown a case — by dear old dad, not the police — to investigate rumors that one of the local covens was abducting and drugging young women fresh off their recruitment into the Houses.”

_He only ever used it to…And he made all of us use it to…_

Jakob studied her features in silence. “You might have mentioned we had that particular lead earlier,” he finally said.

“No, that’s the thing,” said Steph. “It never panned out, every last one of them was returned unharmed. They were all in perfect health. Still lucid enough to remember his face, his voice, where they’d been, what they’d discussed; everything.”

“Hmm.”

“There wasn’t anything in their systems, no evidence of abuse, no nothing,” Steph said. “There was so _little_ evidence of any wrongdoing that it made me even more suspicious something was going on. But there wasn’t much to do beyond watch and wait. And you know how it goes.”

“Always something more pressing,” Jakob said.

Steph nodded. “So, I dropped it. And years went by, and he died, and I stopped feeling quite so bad about never solving it, because if he _was_ hurting those girls, well, he got his. But…A rock. Sure, he didn’t _show_ you anything, but…A _rock._ ”

“A rock.”

“And that aside, what you heard in there makes me wonder. Was that first wave just practice? Was he trying to see how far he could push before we found out? Did the Prescott kid kill him because he pushed too far? Or is it all just…”

“Coincidence,” Jakob offered.

Steph didn’t acknowledge him, didn’t finish the thought.

Jakob sighed. “I’m gonna need to shoot that brat at some point,” he said.

Some sort of strangled cough signaled Steph’s escape from her thoughts. “Please don’t.”

“Mmh.”

“Jakob. Our investigation is already a train wreck with no leads beyond this vague idea about a dead man I want to follow up on, and in addition to the _three_ recent attempted murders that happened on my watch, you killing someone before I have time to confirm _anything_ that brat told you will also be my fault.”

“Hmm.”

“I’m serious,” Steph went on. “Looking into another House like this is already dangerous. If he wasn’t lying…I need to be sure of too many things right now. Please don’t shoot him.”

“Shooting him might help.”

“Jakob, no.”

“Could clear some things up.”

“…I hope not,” she said, suddenly resigned.

Which was fair. But the fact remained, Nathan Prescott made the exact wrong threat in front of the exact wrong person. He _was_ going to hurt him; whether it came before or after the work was finished would be decided as it happened.

Before, he’d been willing to be patient. Less and less as the revelations came.

Steph smiled wryly at him, like she’d read his every thought. “The way things are going, you’ll get your chance. Just give me some time, that’s all I’m asking.”

“Fine,” Jakob said.

Less than three steps behind him, a young man cleared his throat. “Sir,” they said, a noticeable tremble to their voice. One of his, then. “I lost you earlier — had to look through nearly every place on the block.”

As slow as he could manage, Jakob turned to meet their eyes. The one he’d assigned to watch over Rachel in his absence.

“There’s been an emergency,” the man went on, glancing once vaguely in Steph’s direction and looking quickly away. “It, uh,”

“Go on,” she said softly when it became clear he was rapidly approaching too scared to speak. Her public face: the caring heir of Black House. “I won’t be important enough to warrant that kind of fear until tomorrow. Today, I’m just a friend.”

That, casual as it came, pulled at Jakob’s attention like rope at his throat. “Tomorrow?”

“Oh, right, I hadn’t told you yet! I had the succession ceremony moved up to tomorrow; get it over with as fast as possible, you know? Ideally, we can get everyone in and out before anyone realizes how much I hate these things,” she offered.

Like the act taking on the title of First, like becoming the leader of her House, like becoming one of the most powerful magicians in their small world meant about as much as a bad family gathering.

“Hmm,” Jakob said. He turned back to the man. “So. Your emergency.”

“Rachel is back, but no one can find her,” he blurted. A full body wince wracked him as he finished.

Jakob narrowed his eyes. “Explain.”

“About an hour after your meeting with the boss, she left. We…Honestly, sir, most of us assumed she was leaving for good. There was a lot of property damage; basically everything in her path that wasn’t bolted down or magic was in pieces before the House started repairing things.”

In better circumstances, she would deserve praise for that.

But, calling what they went through a _meeting_ was an overly generous interpretation. Jakob had practically dragged Rachel into that office with him, ready to accuse her father of working with Silver House to arrange the attempt on Chloe’s family. It would have been the push she needed to leave for good.

Instead, he was interrupted before he could start. Instead, James Amber dropped his act more thoroughly than he’d ever allowed it to slip, and informed them of an agreement struck with Silver House ten years ago: Rachel had been sold into marriage. Her first meeting with the Prescott brat was arranged to take place during the Black House succession ceremony. _For the strength of the Houses._

And because even that wasn’t enough, because even _that_ didn’t carry enough threat in his eyes, he’d added, _if you try to run, I will kill Chloe Price. I will personally hunt you both to the ends of the earth and smother out whatever naive notions of independence you insist on clinging to. Either by choice or by force, you_ will _learn obedience to your House; you have the potential to be the best of us, Rachel, and it’s long past time you started acting like it._

The implication that he’d never intended Jakob be the one to make Chloe disappear came across loud and clear. A threat for three, given to one.

So, Jakob left with a barely contained murderous rage clenched in his fists. He’d assigned one of his men to keep eyes on Rachel on the off chance she did anything stupid, called Steph to inform her of their new situation, and waited out the hours until his meeting with Prescott like an obedient little pawn.

“She’s back,” said Jakob, almost a question.

“Yes. Yes,” the man floundered for a moment, wetting his lips and darting his eyes around as if he might catch the way to word things buzzing through the dark. “She came back in the middle of the night lugging an entire pot of coffee under her arm. One of the rookies tried to stop her and ask if anything was wrong…They’ll be out of the hospital soon, God willing.”

Jakob grunted thoughtfully. “You said no one could find her.”

“Right, that’s the thing,” said the man, throwing a glance over his shoulder and leaning closer. “She wouldn’t talk to anyone, not even on the upper floors, and we…We sort of lost track of her in there. I watched her vanish into the walls like they weren’t even there. She hasn’t come out in hours. Honestly, we’re all starting to worry she _can’t._ No one has ever done that before.”

A harsh scowl settled over Jakob’s face. He didn’t dare look to judge Steph’s reaction.

~*~

The first place he’d intended to check was Rachel’s room. _Intended_ being the key word, because the House fought him every step of the way, halls shifting at every turn and leading him to and from nothing like _nothing_ was the only destination in the world.

The building always did have a temper when it came to protecting Rachel’s privacy. But he’d never seen such a struggle.

It wasn’t until his stubbornness won out and placed him square in front of the door that he realized why. The entire thing was blown clean off its hinges — from the inside, the smallest of comforts — and lying in a dented, crumpled mess in the middle of the hall. No one, not a single person, was nearby, and an eerie silence weaved into the still of the air.

The room itself was in a similar state; the mattress overturned, shelves and drawers thrown from corner to corner, and their contents spilled across the distance. There were, too, books that must have come from somewhere else, each page and every title worn and faded to near illegibility. They were thrown scattered over everything else with the exact same lack of care. Jakob picked up the nearest one, half-lodged in the space between the mess of what might have at one point been a dresser and a shredded-up rug.

 _The bond, as it is commonly known,_ it read, handwritten text barely still clinging to the fraying surface of the pages, _is a mystery that has plagued magicians in recent years. However, it was not always this way._

He dropped the book back to the floor without bothering to read further.

It made sense, he supposed, that she would want to know more. James Amber’s years of prattling on about its importance finally coming to a head in the form of a threat was certainly powerful motivation. And Rachel never was one for walking blindly into anything.

Then again…

Jakob breathed in slowly, feeling the air stretch his lungs to their limits. He breathed out.

“Please tell me you kids finally made it out of here,” he whispered to no one but himself and the empty room, one hand coming to pinch at the bridge of his nose.

It wasn’t meant to be taken as a request. But the House answered. The whole world shifted abruptly around him. A gust of black mist, liquid and air at once, whipped itself up into opaque waves spilling from the walls, curling paths higher and higher until every one of Jakob’s senses was swallowed by the dark.

There was nothing.

He couldn’t see.

He couldn’t hear.

He couldn’t speak.

And then, he could.

Like he’d never moved, never lost the ability to know up from down, he stood on something solid. He was outside. The early-afternoon sun shined over the ripples of water in front of him. The sounds of the city rang out beneath him. Overhead, clouds shifted and flowed in impossibly slow waves. He took a single shaky breath.

Outside. He was outside. The penthouse lounge was behind him. The pool ahead of him. And Rachel, perched in the exact same spot he’d found Chloe two short days before.

“Rachel,” he said, surprisingly confident, surprisingly level, and shoved the experience from his mind. Too much strange magic in one day was always a challenge.

Rachel waved without looking. She sat perched on the ledge of the pool, knees tucked up to her chin and something rectangular clutched to her chest. Her every movement was heavy, sluggish. “I wasn’t sure that would work.”

“Hmm?”

“This place…Never mind,” she mumbled. After a beat, she shook her head and gestured Jakob closer, turning just far enough to see him from the corner of her eyes.

For a breath, Jakob cast a glance to the skyline. “You’ve got everyone here scared half to death.”

The thing she was holding, hiding, she lifted in the air for him to see. Another book.

Jakob moved closer.

“What’s this,” he asked, taking it from her. There was no title. The pages were loose. The spine was cracked. It seemed more journal than book; there was even — had been, rather — some sort of lock that Rachel managed to destroy.

“Read it,” she ordered.

And so he did. The final entry was dated roughly ten years ago.

_Rachel,_

_I hope you never find this. I hope it stays hidden away in this secret library long enough to disappear. But, if something happens to you, if the magic in this place decides one day that you_ do _need to see the secrets I’ve kept here…_

_‘If you’re reading this, I’m already dead,’ sounds just a bit too dramatic, even for me. But, if you’re reading this, I’m dead. Or gone._

_Tonight, I’m leaving. Or at least trying to._

_I never mentioned the name Will Price to you before, but knowing you, you’ve chosen to start with the ending. You’ll find more about him in my older entries. He and a few other very kind witches have made careers out of helping magicians escape the men who run our world. I’ve been told they exist wherever you can find men like your father._

_A secret network of people who care, just waiting to be found._

_I trust them to keep my secret. I trust their coven with my life._

_If the time ever comes that you need an escape, if that’s why you’re reading this at all, find Will Price. Find his family._

_Goodbye._

“The rest of the entries are written to me, too,” Rachel said bitterly. The tone of voice didn’t reach her eyes. Mostly, she looked tired. “…I was with Chloe last night.”

Jakob handed the journal back. He pushed a sharp exhale through his nostrils.

“I assume this is related,” he said.

 _Find his family._ He’d always feared he was wrong about Chloe. Apparently he was.

Because if that entry was to be trusted, Chloe was the child of a witch. And yet, one that had managed to lead a life with no knowledge or talent for magic. He needed it to be related because he’d more than put in the work, never confident in the results, and yet never able to find more. It was long past time for answers.

“It started a few nights before we brought her here. I just wanted to do something nice. We’ve been…” The rest of Rachel’s explanation trailed off in a frustrated huff of air. When she started again, the strain of holding back tears had turned her voice rough and quiet. “I just wanted to _show_ her. But I touched her, and…Now _every_ time I touch her, and even when I don’t…It’s like I can feel her thoughts.”

“The books in your room,” Jakob said under his breath, an image fading into clarity. It wasn’t fear for her future, it was _Chloe._

Of course it was Chloe.

Jakob didn’t know much about the bond beyond what James Amber had spewed out at one point or another, but he’d never heard a thing about ordinaries being capable. Only, Chloe’s father…So then, maybe she wasn’t magic, but she was far from ordinary. Something else altogether, then. Because if anyone could find a way to give Rachel everything she never wanted without even being aware she’d done so, it was Chloe.

But Rachel kept on, either unaware or uncaring that he’d spoken, expertly hiding a sniffle behind her first words. “I can feel what she feels, and feel what she thinks, and it’s _terrifying._ But I was managing. I never pushed too far. I stayed in control. Just like you taught me after Frank. Leave it to Chloe to fuck up all my hard work by _caring._ ”

Jakob frowned at that. “What.”

“Her eyes were glowing,” she said, exhausted. “I could feel her in my head. She just…Did it. She just did that like it was nothing. I know I don’t sound like it, but I’m kind of losing it right now. None of those books had advice on what to do when your very not-magic girlfriend figures out how to use magic to see inside your mind.”

“No,” Jakob said. “I guess they wouldn’t.”

“Hey, Jakob?”

“Mmh.”

“Being bonded kind of sucks, actually.”

A gust of wind unsettled the surface of the pool. In the distance, impatient drivers honked their car horns against the tide of traffic.

If Chloe’s eyes were glowing…No. If Nathan Prescott’s mystery magic was an attempt to mimic the _old_ magic…It would track with what he’d revealed about his old coven, and the bond _was_ old magic. Things had changed over the years. If that was how old magic manifested — and if that was how a poor imitation manifested — then…

He had something.

“Are you positive,” he tried, gently. “That it isn’t something else?”

Rachel glared, slamming a single palm into the tile surrounding the pool hard enough to crush through to concrete. She barely seemed to feel it. Her eyes were glowing. Just barely, just for an instant, a faint flicker of light.

And it wasn’t that he hadn’t believed her until that moment; Rachel and Chloe were capable of nothing together if not spectacularly fucking everything up. But in the calming hazel-green glow of her eyes, he saw truth

“I need to control this,” Rachel whispered, curling back into herself with a frustrated sigh.

Jakob watched in silence as she struggled to reign in the anger and the fear. Then, “Would it be such a bad thing to lose control to her?”

Because control brought Rachel to a point, but control would never give her the strength to leap. There were reasons to be scared, there were monsters in her past, but Chloe was not them.

“Yes!” Rachel nearly shouted. “Because if I can’t keep this thing wrapped up and dealt with, someone will find out! And then we’ll be trapped here forever with a magic murder cult ready to treat us like the second god damn coming until one of us has a problem with it.”

“Then run. Take Chloe and go.”

“I,” Rachel said, and groaned, and began again, clawing at the edges of the journal. “You know we can’t anymore.”

“Hmm.”

“God, I really didn’t want this to be it. I came back to prove to myself it wasn’t. No one would give a shit about her if it wasn’t. We could have just _left._ But. Then I found this.” After a beat, she flipped open to an earmarked page and began reading aloud. “ _My only value to him is as a potential source of the bond. I’ve known for our entire marriage, really, but meeting that witch has finally put it all in perspective. Will Price. I’m meeting with him again this week. I can’t stay here any longer.”_

“…Sounds familiar.”

“What happens when _he_ finds out?” she asked.

Jakob looked to the pool. He shoved his hands into his pockets.

The threat of death had never been enough to dull Rachel’s spirit before. There was no reason for that to change. He would find some way to keep them both safe. Even from family. Especially from family.

But only so long as they left.

“Rachel,” he said, and again asked the question she refused to answer. “What are you still doing here?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> took an extra week on this chapter because it was A Lot. just barely the longest one!!! but also i had to go back and double check + make some edits to a bunch of previous chapters because i forgot my own timeline for a good bit there. oops
> 
> anyway, thanks to everyone sticking with me through this big weird au!


	10. Interlude - Max

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “ _Trevor!_ ” she shrieked loud enough that Max winced at the volume. “I swear to God, if you try to turn Max into your pack mule for this shit _one_ more time!”
> 
> Trevor was kind of an idiot.

The first step Max took into the venue echoed off the walls so intensely that for nearly a full minute she stood frozen, caught in the grip of some primal fear that announcing her presence was all it would take for the dream to break. Because it _was_ a dream.

Right?

It was open, and modern, and minimalist in all the ways galleries were expected to be. Cool, blue-grey concrete floors and white plaster walls. The impossible geometry of a warehouse ceiling hidden behind tangles of vents, and pipes, and wires. It was everything she ever hoped for. And it was _hers._ Which meant it had to be a dream.

…Right?

Except.

The lighting situation was _ridiculously_ tacky. Rows on rows of cheap, hazy light bulbs suspended from countless black iron poles. Dream Max had better taste.

As if only waiting for that confirmation, Victoria Chase, her friend and mentor, shouted at someone just ahead. She was directing a handful of workers around like a woman possessed, dressed in a silky black blouse, wide leg dress slacks, and _very_ expensive heels. _Not there,_ there, _you god damn imbecile, I’m paying you more than enough to read the fucking labels before you —_

The venue’s owner was nowhere in sight, but the venue’s owner was like them.

Not one of them, not a part of their coven, but part of their network. Witches of their sort — those who dedicated their lives to seeing others freed from groups like the Houses — had family everywhere. There was safety in that.

And according to Victoria, said owner was perfectly willing to let her have run of the place for the sake of their cover story, and _that_ was why she’d been absent and unable to meet with Max ever since they arrived. Victoria had her hard at work, helping to plan out the theme, and the advertising, and anything else that needed connections she didn’t have on her own.

Not that Max asked. But Victoria _really_ liked knowing people were aware of her accomplishments.

“Maxine,” Victoria snapped, words flowing off the tail end of her latest complaint like water. “Don’t think I can’t see you cowering over there. Get inside.”

Max snorted. She adjusted the paper grocery bag in her grip and stepped up to Victoria’s side. “Call me Maxine again and we’ll see who’s cowering.”

“Just making sure I have your attention. Cover or no, tonight is big for you. I need you _here,_ not acting like you just finished digging into whatever stash of garbage Dumb and Dumber dumped all their money into today.”

“Ah,” Max said, and lifted the bag slightly. Beer cans rattled around inside. “Speaking of.”

Victoria snatched it away and stormed off without another word.

To her, anyway. “ _Trevor!_ ” she shrieked loud enough that Max winced at the volume. “I swear to God, if you try to turn Max into your pack mule for this shit _one_ more time!”

Trevor was kind of an idiot.

Justin, too, even if he’d had the good sense to not bother Max in her last moments of freedom with a very colorful series of texts about the state of his beer.

She still wasn’t entirely sure why she’d helped.

Usually with those two, it was the other way around: Justin the idiot, and Trevor the just-barely straight man of their accidental comedy duo.

Usually, Max didn’t bat an eye at doing them favors. The doubt was new.

Something about being in New York was turning everything on its head. Maybe it was the place. Maybe it was that the four of them had never worked a job together before. Maybe it was the job itself. Because it was big. Bigger than big. Big enough that the four of them were only half the full team. Big enough that a _cleanup crew_ was coming in after they’d finished to deal with the former witch whose wave of murders set it all in motion.

Witches took care of their own. Even if they weren’t anymore. Even if they’d never really been.

It was also Max’s first job as anything more than a shadow to someone with actual experience. So, on top of everything affecting everyone else, she was miles past being in over her head.

It was terrifying.

And Victoria was too busy to help. Max looked slowly around the gallery, trying to keep her breathing level now that she was alone again. “One,” she said under her breath, timing the count to an exhale. “Two. Three.”

The memories resurfaced anyway.

 _“So,” Rachel Amber said once they were finally alone again. She had been staring ever since Max tried winding her spellwork up Chloe’s arm. Her voice had fallen colder than ice and sharper than a razor, but her smile…_ Oh, _her smile. It was the most beautiful thing Max had ever seen. Literally, ever. In her life. “You’re a witch.”_

_And when Rachel reached for her, when her fingertips skimmed across the rise and the fall of Max’s knuckles, a heat powerful enough to sear her thoughts into hollowed out echoes of life roared through her. Max could barely still move, barely still think._

_It took all of her strength to nod._

_Rachel hummed then, and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. Even through the terror of her power, even through the knowledge that there was someone out there strong enough to hurt her, to cut her, to make her bruised and bloody, that, too, was beautiful._

_“And you know who I am,” she said next. It wasn’t a question._

Max shut her eyes tight.

“One,” she began again, staggering over to a nearby bench. One of the nice ones that only ever seemed to exist in places like the one they were in. With cushions. Big ones. “Two. Three.”

 _Rachel pulled back. Not far enough to be out of reach, but far enough to sever the connection, and oh, oh,_ oh _the sense of loss was even worse than its presence. It was soul crushing. It was devastating. It was captivating._

_In that instant, the gulf of skill separating them was clearer than crystal. It was an insurmountable distance. An impassible chasm. Max had never in her life known anyone so powerful._

_For entire seconds she barely remembered how to breathe._

_“Max, what does a witch from the other end of the country want with Chloe?” Rachel asked. The only thing in the world Max wanted was to answer._

Somewhere in the distance, Trevor whined a nasally not-whine and swatted ineffectually at Victoria’s hand as he fled into the back.

“Four. Five. Six,” Max continued, gripping too hard at the front of the bench, the heels of her palms digging into pleather and the pads of her fingers crushing against metal.

_“I, uh,” Max spoke without meaning, without trying, without thinking. Her heart was pounding too hard, too fast, too —_

_“You…” Rachel echoed like she only wanted to be helpful, resting her chin in a palm and bringing herself closer to Max’s level._

_Watching her was like staring at the sun, but looking away…The air itself was ice, every second fading colder, and colder, and colder._

_“…I,” Max began again._

The weight of someone taking the seat next to her barely registered. The feeling of a single slender hand coming to rest on her thigh, thumb drawing circles just above the knee barely more.

“Seven,” Max continued, slower, but still. Her senses were returning, the world fading back to clarity. The person beside her remained silent. “Eight.”

She could have kept going. She didn’t. One final breath in. Out. She opened her eyes, gaze locked firm on her shoes. They were an old pair of Converse, yellowed at the sole. When she had first been let in on Victoria’s plans, she’d wanted to wear something nice, something that would make it look like she was at least _attempting_ to keep up.

But then Victoria started in on her, _know your goals, Max; your shots are far too intimate for you to be dressing like me,_ and somewhere in the storm that was half of Victoria’s closet being thrown her way, they’d settled on one of Taylor’s pale green military jackets over a dark tee and darker chinos. It was a nice look, contrasting perfectly with her brown hair and blue eyes. She looked nice. Victoria always did have a knack for palettes.

Max hadn’t bothered asking why everything Taylor owned seemed to be in the closet. She knew well enough after a decade to leave that particular subject alone.

And in the moment, in the present, keeping the memory at the front of her mind was the only thing holding reminders of Rachel Amber at bay.

Max swallowed down more of her fear and spoke to her shoes, hoping the woman beside her might answer instead. “Do you ever think…I mean, I’m in so far over my head right now, V. If these people are dangerous enough to — I mean, if you’d _met_ her…She wasn’t even touching me, it was just the _absence_ of it, and that level of control…It — cripes, how is Chloe _alive_ right now? These people are monsters. They’re strong enough to _hurt_ monsters!”

“Yeah,” Victoria said; the voice of someone who had heard it all before. The voice of someone who had lived it all before. “That’s the job.”

Max whimpered, hoping the sound didn’t carry into earshot. “You didn’t bring me along for this just because I used to know Chloe, right?”

“Max —”

“This isn’t, just, like, bullying the underclassman, making fun of me because I wanted to honor William, right?”

“— Max, stop.”

“Because I don’t know what you expect me to do to stop someone like Rachel Amber from hurting her.”

The irritation in Victoria’s groan could have cracked bedrock. “ _Maxine._ ”

“Yes?”

“Every single person with any say in where you might have ended up wanted you because of your connection to him. His daughter isn’t able to carry on his legacy, but she wasn’t the only one he never shut up about. Get used to it.”

“…Oh.”

“But,” Victoria said, refusing to look away from the rest of the gallery. Her fingers continued their work at Max’s knee. “I wanted you because of _your_ potential.”

“You think I have —”

“I’ve put too much work into you to have you doubting me now. This? Right here? This is you trying _very_ hard to make me regret sticking my neck out for so long.”

Max barely repressed a shudder. Were she smarter, she would have stayed quiet and accepted that as truth. “You should have brought Taylor instead, this is too important.”

A silence grew. One empty of everything but the distant noise of photos being moved, and hung, and moved some more. Victoria let loose a resigned, disappointed exhale. Her hand stilled, index finger tapping exactly twice at Max’s knee.

“Probably,” she finally said.

Max watched her intently. Victoria still refused to tear her gaze from the work. Her hand was still touching, still unmoving, and vaguely chilly with a magic that Max had only just begun to notice.

Had it been there the whole time?

“Oh,” she whispered, because Victoria’s magic was…It stripped away negative emotion piece by piece and layer by layer until there was nothing left. But it didn’t disappear. It had to end up somewhere. She’d trained herself to take it into herself, funneling the rush quickly to anger, because if nothing else, Victoria Chase knew anger.

“Yeah. The worst I ever get from Tay is shit about taking the work too seriously. Grow a god damn spine, Max. We’re not even the ones with the hard job here. Worry about the team coming in after us to clean up ten years of Nathan _fucking_ Prescott. They aren’t all coming back.”

“No, I — _you,_ V. I forgot.”

Victoria snatched her hand away like she’d been burned, eyes narrowing in suspicion. “…You _forgot_ how much of a bitch magic makes me.”

Max reached hesitantly in her direction. She decided against it at the last second. “Yeah. You’ve been so nice lately.”

A quirked eyebrow so far past disbelieving that even Max struggled to believe herself was the only answer she gave.

“I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s not like you ever _stop_ being a bitch,” Max said, wearing the faint beginnings of a smile.

For the first time since arriving, she looked to the place that had held Victoria’s attention for so long. It stopped her breathless. The centerpiece of the show. The last picture Max took before they’d all left for New York, blown up to nearly the full height of the wall.

Victoria.

Standing in front of the massive living room window of her new apartment, her body framed in blinding dawn light and nothing more than a silhouette faded away at the edges, arms outstretched at perfect right angles and frozen in the midst of throwing open the curtains.

Anyone else might have claimed putting _that_ photo _there_ was purely to satisfy Victoria’s ego. But it was _Max’s_ shot.

Suddenly, Victoria snorted. And laughed. And laughed, and laughed, and laughed. “What?” she asked, finally looking Max in the eyes. “You think I did that for you? It’s my favorite.”

~*~

The show itself was like a dream.

Surreal didn’t begin to cover it; the safety of familiar company wrapped up in the haunting reality that people were there for _her_.

It was proof the gallery was real, even if it wasn’t. Her dreams were coming true, even if they weren’t. Not really. The whole thing was a plan cobbled together by people who knew better than her in nowhere near enough time, and Max was spending most of her evening too anxious about where, and when, and how to use her magic in such a public space to make any real inroads with interested parties.

That her only real magical talent was foresight — knowing the outcomes to her choices before she made them — didn’t exactly help things, either. Everyone was _already_ interested in her work. Using it seemed more than a little redundant.

And. That aside. The last time she tried using it was on Chloe. It hadn’t worked on Chloe. There was the familiar rush, but then…Nothing. She wasn’t ready to try it again.

But, when it all got to be too much — the congratulating, and the thanking, and the _oh, you should really consider getting business cards, they’re so useful for networking at your age, here, I know a place —_ Victoria was perfectly willing to let her recover at her side. It gave her the chance to talk for them both, and she never was one to turn down an opportunity to put words in Max’s mouth.

Justin and Trevor meanwhile, were hard at work among the crowd.

They’d spent the final hour or so after Max’s arrival threatening to spend the night stealing champagne and hors d’oeuvres before any of the guests could get to them, and _that_ led to Victoria pulling out a rolled up magazine and violently herding them back into the office, shouting about how they’d have to climb over her dead and rotting corpse before they had the chance. It kept them quiet. For awhile, anyway. They _did_ need to be let out eventually.

And the thing about Justin and Trevor at work, Max learned, was that they may as well have been completely different people.

They didn’t blend in. Not even remotely. But they _fit_ in so well it was like stepping into a parallel universe. One where strangers believed them to be eloquent and interesting even as they stumbled over their own words like they’d forgotten whole pieces of the alphabet. Their magic had strangers lowering their guards enough to join in on the fun. To laugh, and joke, and make small talk because it truly seemed as if nothing bad could _possibly_ come from being too revealing around them. Max wasn’t sure what exactly they were hoping to learn, but truthfully, it also didn’t seem worth asking.

Maybe if she had, she would have noticed sooner.

She was hiding out, seeking comfort in Victoria’s work for the third or fourth time that evening when Justin slipped up beside her.

“I love this one,” he said, eyes on the same photo Max had been admiring.

It was smaller, hidden off in one of the back corners; less a statement of quality than a statement of confidence, Max knew. There was a breathtaking intimacy to it that felt a little bit like intruding on a private moment. In it, Taylor lie sprawled out across a beach towel, caught in the shade of an umbrella and wearing a too-big white graphic tee with some inscrutable album art stretching the length. She was deep in sleep, lips barely parted and her long blonde hair splayed out in a perfect halo.

“Me too,” Max answered. “It’s always nice to see V admit she wants something.”

Justin let out a single quack of a laugh. “I just meant Taylor’s hot. Anyway, dude, news for you.”

Max turned, suddenly confused.

“It’s nothing bad, don’t worry. Although if you are…Okay, so, Trevor and I kinda decimated the drink, but we might still have some weed in the back if you want me to go check.” Justin pressed ahead. “Anyway — anyway, so, Chloe Price is here. How come no one ever told me what a badass that chick is? I know we had, like, a file on her and everything, and I’m _supposed_ to read those, but —”

“What.”

“— Obviously I don’t, and now I _so_ wish I did, because,” Justin said, and laughed, almost a snort “Like…Shit, I gotta see if she’ll smoke me out while we’re here, I bet she’s got that top secret rich people weed —”

“Justin!” Max hissed, swatting at his shoulder. More than a handful of heads turned in their direction, so Max led them off to some quiet back hall. “Chloe is here?”

“Yeah. She’s looking for you, by the way,” he said, beaming like absolutely nothing was wrong.

“For me? Here? You’re sure?”

“I mean, I think so? I’m only kinda drunk, not —”

The answer to her question came in the form of a second someone stepping up behind her and leaning in, too close, lips nearly pressed to her ear as they whispered, so breathy, _so_ softly, “How’s it going, Maximus?”

Max whirled around so fast she would have tripped and fallen to the floor had Justin not caught her. Because Chloe was there, high top skate shoes, shredded up jeans, and an old grey tank top with a collar so low it only barely covered her bra like she wasn’t surrounded on all sides by strangers in expensive clothing. She had one hand shoved gracelessly into a pocket and the other slicking back through her hair, messy sapphire blue strands brushed away from her face, and her _smile…_

Was, very out of place.

Because Chloe was _very_ angry at her the last time they spoke, not to mention her…Her… _Rachel,_ her whatever-she-was, was…

“I’ll take that as a ‘good’,” Chloe said, finally leaning back into her own space, stretching into her own height, and towering above her. “Thanks for showing me the way, man.”

Justin grinned and nodded. “Any time! Hey, before I forget, do you think we could —”

“ _Justin!_ ” Max found herself screeching again.

He seemed to get the message that time, retreating without comment back into the crowd.

“Hey, so,” Chloe said then, and every last one of Max’s senses were suddenly drenched in fear over what she might have to say. “I owe you an apology for last night.”

Max said nothing. Max couldn’t speak.

Chloe, however, laughed a nervous sort of laugh, part sigh and part empty vocalization as she reached up to wring out the back of her neck. “Yeah, that’s about what I expected. How about this; I’m gonna check out this Max Caulfield girl’s work. I hear she’s actually a pretty good photographer these days. And I’d really appreciate it if the woman in question felt up to having a conversation.”

She was gone nearly before she finished talking. Time crashed to a halt and rolled itself back to movement before Max realized what happened and rushed off in a huff to catch up.

But even that wasn’t the reset she’d expected. She followed helplessly after while Chloe browsed, flitting restlessly from place to place, never far enough into the crowd to escape Max’s sight and always close enough to ensure that she would never be able to find the words.

She came close, once, but then Chloe found a shot that left her smiling and all coherent thought ejected itself from her mind.

Chloe should have been angry. Max _wanted_ her to be angry. But she just… _Wasn’t._ Not even when she stumbled onto the group of shots Max had never been able to explain beyond that they felt inexplicably like a world that only existed in their childhood. A chase after the blurred, abstract feelings of nostalgia. A small town park in the last moments of dusk, golden and purple and 3 bodies in different states of motion, just a bit out of focus in every single one. Three smiling faces, running, fading, blurring into the distance.

“That blonde girl. The one giving me the stink eye when I showed up,” Chloe asked, looking intensely between the photos. “Short hair, fancy clothes; she’s the colleague you mentioned?”

Max nodded. “…Yes?”

“She’s hot. Teen Chloe woulda loved to sucker punch a stuck up rich bitch like that and then give her some angry under the shirt action in the back of a parking lot.”

“Uh.”

Chloe’s laugh — slow, and rough, and raspy — stole the air from Max’s lungs. She sounded like their childhood but…But so fundamentally different that it _hurt_ on some base level Max couldn’t describe.

“Sorry,” Chloe said. She leaned back, shoving her hands into her pockets. “Not why I’m here. Rach has a big family thing. I never know what to do with myself when she’s dealing with that shit.”

“Family thing?” Max questioned.

“Yeah. Some kind of dinner her aunt threw together. Or, not her aunt exactly, I think she’s more like a family friend? The whole thing wasn’t supposed to be for another few weeks, but…You know what, don’t worry about it. Not your problem.”

It took Max a moment to piece together that Chloe hadn’t meant Rachel’s actual family. Rachel Amber didn’t have much in the way of biological family. Least of all an aunt. But she was close to an important figure in another House. Black, or Blue, or Blurple. One of those. And Max was _almost_ sure it was a woman.

Not to mention, Victoria told her once or twice that their being in New York might line up with an important House ceremony. Which meant she would want to know if it had been moved up. It could disrupt all of their plans. Something could go terribly wrong, or someone could get hurt, or —

“Anyway, I’m sorry for last night, dude,” Chloe said. She started anxiously tapping a foot, staring off into the distance and very specifically not meeting Max’s eyes. “It’s been, just…Me and Rach here. For so long. I think seeing you made me angrier about having that disrupted than about…You know, _you._ ”

The need to find Victoria and tell her what was happening felt suddenly unimportant. “You’re not mad?”

“Of course I’m mad. My best friend in the whole world dropped me like a sack of shit ten years ago and only bothered reaching out because Joyce died.”

“Chloe —”

“But that’s not your fault. How the hell,” she went on, laughing lightly at some joke Max wasn’t in on. “How the hell would two idiots like us ever have figured that shit out?”

Chloe laughed, but it felt forced. Max could practically taste the hurt.

“I’m am sorry though, Chloe. I should have tried harder,” she said.

“You should have. But I should have, too. So, far as I’m concerned, we’re even.”

“Oh. Okay.” Max blinked. Her next words escaped before she could stop them. “So — so, Rachel?”

“Yeah,” Chloe breathed and smirked, turning to meet Max’s gaze. The light caught her eyes for an instant suspended in time and stretched out across forever, blue flashing momentarily brighter than life beneath the glare. It pierced Max all the way down to her soul. “She’s, like, obsessed with you, by the way.”

_What does a witch want with Chloe?_

“What?” Max nearly choked.

“Yeah. Yeah, she called you _precious_ and demanded I fix things with you. I know you don’t know her, so the weight of that is definitely lost on you, but _fuck,_ dude _,_ she’s never loved anyone that much after one night.”

“Oh.”

“To be perfectly honest, my stubborn ass probably woulda gone right on ignoring you if it wasn’t for her.”

“…Oh,” Max said, less word than the air being evacuated. Letting that admission settle into place took a moment. Remembering how to speak again took another.

In the struggle, she could almost have sworn that Chloe’s eyes flickered again. She could have sworn she watched Chloe furrow her brow, staring suddenly off into the distance like she was half expecting something or someone to burst straight through the doors.

But still trapped behind a wall of her own thoughts screeching out like deafening dial tone, Max didn’t have the first clue how to know if she’d imagined it or not.

_“Max, you’re not answering my question.”_

_“I can’t — I, um…” Max tried, and stumbled, and tried again, that intangible need to speak truths Rachel wanted, maybe_ needed _to hear still tugging at her heart in the space between every last pulse of fear through her body. She could barely still breathe. “I’m not here for her. Not really. I just…I needed to see her.”_

_It was a partial truth._

_It was all she could manage._

_Rachel didn’t speak._

_And in that silence, something in Max broke. Her throat tensed up. Her lungs stopped working. The air was coming too fast, too shallow, and it felt like someone was pushing a knife straight into her chest, but then…_

_But then._

_Rachel’s every feature softened. She tilted her head just barely to the side, lips parted in an emotion Max couldn’t decipher through the panic or the pain. She moved to tuck some loose strands of hair behind her ear and brushed a thumb along Max’s cheek. Suddenly the whole world was fading, slowing, falling away. The whole world was disappearing, leaving her dozy, limp, and lost beneath a wave of comfort._

_The rest of Rachel’s fingers followed the touch, every gentle point of contact pressing one by one by one against the line of her jaw, urging her closer, tucking her away against the crook of her neck._

_“I’m sorry, baby,” Rachel whispered. It didn’t feel like an apology. It felt like a lie. “I think I overreacted. Things haven’t been great around here, lately.”_

_All Max could manage in answer was a whimper. She didn’t believe a word, but Rachel pulled her closer, and the warmth spread deeper, and she couldn’t quite remember what it was that she didn’t believe, anymore. Something soft nuzzled into the top of her head._

_“You’re safe,” she heard, or maybe didn’t. “You’re safe.”_

“Chloe?” Max asked. Throwing out the name like a lifeline.

Chloe’s gaze didn’t break from the entrance. She seemed almost to be listening to something. “Hmm?”

“You…said —”

“Oh. Oh, right,” she answered, snapping immediately back to their bubble of privacy. “Sorry, I thought I recognized someone. What were we talking about?”

“We…Rachel. Never mind about that, are — are you okay?” Max asked, because something far deeper than distraction was happening.

“Yeah,” Chloe said on the edge of a breath. She ruffled up her hair and patted herself down, searching for something in one of her pockets. “Yeah, it’s fine. I haven’t slept in awhile. Mind’s playing tricks on me, you know how it goes.”

Something flickered against the blue of Chloe’s eyes once again, sparking a fear to life in the pit of Max’s gut intensely reminiscent of what she’d felt in the aftermath of Rachel Amber’s touch.

She pushed an exhale through her teeth. She bit the memory down. “…Chloe.”

Chloe shuddered like being snapped out of a daydream. She blinked, and her irises were glowing. Not flashing, not flickering, but _glowing._ They were a more vibrant blue than any Max had ever known. It vanished the instant she blinked again.

Chloe asked her something then, calm, unaware, and —

Max answered. She couldn’t hear herself speak.

~*~

It wasn’t until some hours after the show and in the dead of night that Victoria let herself be found again. She was standing out back by the dumpsters, arms folded at her chest. Barely contained stress was rolling off her in waves, and she wore a furrow at her brow so intense that it’s very existence defied every snarky comment she’d ever made about _stop that, Max, you’ll get wrinkles._ A cigarette was dangling between two fingers, burning itself down to nothing.

But she gave Max a quick backhanded wave, a sign that whatever was bothering her could wait.

“How likely,” Max asked, barely repressed manic energy just barely winning out over the anxiety still thrumming through her. It pitched her voice more than a few notches higher. “Like, okay, you’ve been doing this for years now.”

“Since I was sixteen. Does this panic have a point?”

“Right. Right. House magicians are up to all kinds of weird magic, right? It’s why they’re so,” Max said, and shuddered. “Have you ever helped anyone with glowing eyes?”

The laugh Victoria let loose in answer was just about the loudest noise Max had ever heard her make: sharp, nasal, perfectly out of place, and somehow still perfectly in character. She bared her teeth, staring Max dead in the eyes. “Max _ine,_ are you hoping for your own little happily ever after with Big Blue?”

“What? No. I’m just…Wondering.”

Victoria laughed again, soft and soundless, far more self satisfied. She took a slow, slow pull from her cigarette and watched through lidded eyes as she blew the smoke back into the dark in one steady stream.

“I forget sometimes how little we’re told until we really commit to this path. It’s probably for the best. When this is all over, if you still have the stomach for it, I’ll get you started on some reading,” she said, something wistful, something wry tinting her voice full shades heavier. Her gaze stayed locked on the sky. The stars were too far beyond the glow of city life to be seen, but she didn’t seem to mind. “Anyway, this afternoon, when you were…”

 _Having a panic attack,_ she didn’t say, some small bit of propriety rather than manners trapping the words behind a vague hand gesture. Max nodded.

“Remember that feeling. As terrified as you are right now, they’re just as scared of us.” After a beat, she began reciting something Max had never heard before. “ _There is nothing a witch will not do when it comes to magic. They must be avoided at all costs, for even animals have the good sense not to bite the hand that feeds. Witches are as monsters, and will bring the Houses to ruin if we do not take the proper precautions._ ”

Victoria raised the cigarette to her lips again. The filter was lightly stained in the red of her lipstick.

“We’re not —”

“Not the point, Max,” Victoria said, and blew smoke straight in Max’s face. “Don’t interrupt.”

Max coughed, but didn’t speak further.

“Glowing eyes? Shared thought? All that affecting-you-even-when-they-aren’t-touching-you crap? That’s all House magic. More accurately, it’s _old_ magic. The kind that vanished centuries ago. We witches accepted that. Moved on. Made the best with what we still had and let magic evolve into something far more personal. It’s what we do; we adapt. House magicians never did. If you ask me, chasing after something for that long while forcing yourselves to live in places practically alive with it is a quick trip to fucked up.”

“…What do you mean?”

For the better part of a minute, Victoria chewed over her answer in silence. “Old magic,” she said after the pause. “Is alive. The Houses — the buildings themselves, not the families — are living things. It might not be life in the way you and I know it, but magicians aren’t the reason those places have stayed hidden from the ordinary world for so long.”

The smoke of Victoria’s cigarette began to dwindle. She didn’t seem to notice. Max didn’t speak.

“That camouflage gave them an opportunity. Entire families have been lost in their attempts to rediscover some sort of connection to the old magic. They’ve never been successful, obviously, because old magic is alive enough to have refused them for centuries. But the people in charge over there don’t care.

To them, all the death becomes worth it if they can find some way to trigger something in their magicians. The bond is their latest focus. If they figure it out, they’ll have their foot in the door, and the two unfortunate enough to have built that connection will be used up until there’s nothing left. If not, they’ll move on and keep pretending they haven’t murdered for nothing.”

“But,” Max tried. She stopped when she realized the thought hadn’t yet crystallized enough to find shape, shutting her eyes in the hopes it might find room to grow. “The bond isn’t real. It’s…It’s bedtime stories and fairy tales. Wouldn’t more people know about it if it wasn’t?”

Victoria smiled that same sad smile, huffing an empty laugh when she finally noticed the state of her cigarette. It was burned to the filter. “Oh, Max. Don’t go stupid on me now.”

A memory rose like bile in Max’s throat.

 _“Well_ howdy, _darlin’!” Rachel had said, the line halfway out even before she’d fully opened the door, and suddenly the whole world tilted on its axes. Chloe lit up. More than she had all night. More even than anything Max remembered of their childhood._

She barely managed to blink herself out before falling beneath the surface all over again.

But.

It was only.

Something stuck, that time.

Watching it happen; watching Rachel stroll into the diner; watching Chloe react like nothing else in the world mattered was like watching someone fall under a spell. The magic in Rachel’s contact, in her words…Even then, even before she’d been touched herself, Max noticed it. It was in everything, even their most casual bits of proximity, flaring out and over the counter, unseen flames licking her skin and leaving her chilled to the bone.

In the moment, it felt like one more piece of proof that Chloe needed rescuing.

But.

It was only.

There was something.

Rachel’s touch.

Chloe’s eyes.

And.

All those stories.

“Wait. Are you telling me you think Chloe and Rachel are bonded?” Max asked.

“Good,” Victoria said, and hummed, dropping the cigarette to the ground to crush beneath her heel. “You noticed.”

“But…Really?”

Because those _were_ just stories.

…Right?

Victoria took a single graceful step closer.

“It’s a big world out there, Max. Anything is possible. Even magic. Even make-believe.” At the unrestrained shock on Max’s face, she continued. “Don’t look so surprised. I’m _good_ at what I do; I’ve suspected for awhile.”

“You _have?_ ”

“Mhm. I would’ve told you sooner, but I didn’t want it affecting your first night with those two. I left their past out of the file, let you think what you wanted to think. Remind me to fill you in sometime.”

“But — _bonded?_ ”

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen two people in my lifetime as hurt by the Houses as them,” Victoria said thoughtfully. “Max, I apologize for keeping you out of the loop, but you were an important piece of this puzzle, and I needed you acting _normally_ until I could be sure. And I am, now. It’s why I’m explaining all of this to you.”

For what she hoped would be the last time that day, Max was rendered completely and utterly speechless. It had Victoria snorting soundlessly all over again.

“So,” Victoria said, walking straight past her and pausing with a hand on the door. “Rachel Amber isn’t some horrible bitch we’re convincing your friend to leave behind, she’s a horrible bitch we’re taking with us. Can you handle that?”

Max tried, but no answer came.

“I think you can. Check your phone, by the way,” Victoria said with an air of finality, vanishing back inside.

Max scrambled to pull her phone from her pockets. She had one new message. A forwarded voicemail was attached.

She pressed play.

For several seconds there was nothing but the crackling static of someone breathing. They sounded almost…Scared? Worried? And then a voice, raspy and barely louder than a whisper.

_Hey._

Max’s blood ran cold.

_You don’t know me, but, um…Well, maybe you do. I don’t know. I don’t care. I’m just…Tired. Of magic. Of all of it. Your friend Max is with me. We’re —_

Rachel Amber cut off suddenly. Another stretch of silence. Faint, restless noises pulled her away from the speaker. A light something in the shape of a laugh followed. And then she breathed the words _no no baby, go back to sleep, you’re safe,_ and Max realized with a sudden rush of emotion when the call must have been made.

She’d woken up in her hotel room the next morning with nothing but cold sweat and bad dreams to keep her company. But then, there was also a faint smear of lipstick at her hairline. And an odd lingering warmth. It had felt so fake with the bad still fresh in her mind.

But. Maybe Rachel meant it after all. About the overreacting.

_— God, I hope you’re really part of her coven and this isn’t just the weirdest fucking voicemail on earth. Uh. We’re at the Two Whales, it’s a place over in the Bronx. I’ll text you the address, it looks like she never got a chance. She’s fine, though. She’s fine. Sleeping._

_When she wakes up she’ll probably be scared out of her mind, but she’s fine. Distance from me should be enough to fix it, but I don’t know. I’ve never actually done…_

_I’m sorry. If she isn’t okay. If she is, too. I’m sorry. I just wanted to keep Chloe safe._

_Get here soon. Please._

Something crackled abruptly through the speakers again. Something clicked. The message ended.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> somehow, this ended up even longer than the last one.


	11. Rachel

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “When you do finally work up the courage? Cause some damage on your way out,” she said, quiet enough that even the few strangers on the edge of the crowd pretending not to listen wouldn’t have managed to overhear. “Convince that Chloe to burn a few things down for me. She seems the type.”

For as long as Rachel could remember, she had known how to be a trophy.

A lifetime spent watching her each and every accomplishment whisked away and warped into proof of _the strength of the Houses_ taught her well enough.

A lifetime of being treated like an object first and a person last, and she was still expected to want anything to do with the Houses, or their strength, or their future. _Succession ceremonies._ She’d never been. Never heard of them, either. All she knew, she’d learned because it was what little her father deigned to share after cornering her and Jakob by the pool and threatening them into obedience.

Threatening _her_ into it, anyway.

Jakob managed to talk himself into a few short hours of freedom and disappeared like a man on a mission, but in the aftermath of everything, Rachel was too tired to fight. That question, _why are you still here,_ was still echoing through her head loud enough to drown out her ability to think. It was a question she should have been able to answer months ago, but every time she tried…

She didn’t know. She didn’t know. And not knowing meant a lot of things. Not least of all that until she did, the only future left for her was one of threats, and magic, and cultish religious ceremonies.

She wanted Chloe. She wanted to leave.

She wanted a lot of things.

None of it used to worry her before, back when Chloe didn’t know. Confrontation never used to scare her before, back when Chloe wasn’t involved. But she knew how to hide it. She knew how to be a trophy: look pretty, be quiet, don’t cause a scene.

And she was resolved to spend her night doing exactly the opposite.

Her father would have expected her to wear a dress. He would have expected hidden injuries and Amber House colors. Black and Gold. Rachel waited until the last possible second before throwing on a crisp white undershirt, a perfectly fitted and unbuttoned grey blazer, matching high waisted pants, and cheap heeled boots. The look brought out the purpled bruise at her throat almost as well as it highlighted the still bandaged and bleeding cuts on her palm. She suffered his glares and condescensions the entire short drive from their House to the next. She wore her injuries like badges of honor.

Her father would have expected her to behave herself. He would have expected her to be obedient, to be willingly paraded around for his friends, or colleagues, or minions, or whatever the other House leaders actually _were_ in his eyes. Because the crowd was nothing but them; nothing but the highest ranking magicians in their tiny little world. Cops, and politicians, and the obscenely wealthy, all gathered together in one place.

Rachel took one step into the lavish Black House ballroom, with its cathedral ceiling and beautifully carved granite pillars, its intricately crafted chandelier lighting floating weightlessly in the very same eerie starless void she’d come to know from Amber House, and she peeled off toward the nearest bit of alcohol in sight. Past the black-tie-event spread of cloth covered hardwood tables, and magic-grown flowers in marble vases, and guests dressed and talking to each other like they were anywhere else infinitely more mundane. Her father was furious.

Her father, too, would have expected her to avoid causing a scene. He would have expected her, on the very slim chance that they became separated, to smile and be silent until he could find his way back to her. Trophies were meant to be seen, not heard, and _definitely_ not left alone.

Rachel swiped two flutes of champagne from a mostly empty table and downed both in seconds, dragging her gaze intently across the ballroom floor. It wasn’t long before she locked eyes with Steph Gingrich. _Stephanie Black,_ she had to remind herself, now that they were in the presence of people to who that difference mattered. She was at the head of the room, the perfect place to make the perfect scene.

She looked the same as ever. Almost exactly like Rachel remembered. But her laugh lines were deeper and the wrinkles around her eyes had grown. Her hair was lighter, whiter, and not quite grayer. She was the same, but she wasn’t.

“ _Auntie Steph!_ ” Rachel shouted at the top of her lungs, already crossing the room at a jog.

Every single set of eyes locked onto her in stunned, horrified silence the moment the name sprang from her lips. Even when Steph herself started laughing like she’d never been more entertained in her life and caught Rachel up in a too-tight hug, the room felt coiled in a tension strained enough to snap.

And her father…

Her father watched it all happen with murder in his eyes.

At least, until the pressure in the room finally did break. Rachel was, after all, the _infamously_ rebellious heir to Amber House, and while her behavior may have been a new sight, it was not a remotely new or unfamiliar reality; she made sure of that years ago. The crowd’s need for normalcy washed over them all in less than the length of a breath.

“It’s so good to see you,” Steph said then, her grip loosening and her hands settling over Rachel’s shoulders with a gentle squeeze. She nodded off toward a quieter corner, safely hidden behind the pillars and mostly out of sight. “What’s it been, three, four years?”

It had been closer to ten. The last time they spoke was a time before Rachel crashed facefirst into rock bottom. Before those final bloody days with Frank. Before her mother vanished. Before Jakob. Before Chloe.

The world was a different place, back then. Steph was the closest thing she’d ever had to a mother, back then. Even when she still had her mother.

“Something like that,” Rachel said with a fond smile.

It was all easier, back then.

Steph clicked her teeth, a laugh without the laugh as she glanced momentarily back to the crowd. No one was watching them. Everyone was aware of them. “Oh, don’t you start humoring my memory problems. I know perfectly well my hair wasn’t this grey the last time I saw you. How have you been?”

Rachel hummed under her breath, a thoughtful nothing threaded through an exhale. She followed Steph’s line of sight out into the nothing, turning to stand shoulder to shoulder. “I’ve _been._ ” She gestured vaguely at the room, then shoved her hands roughly into her pockets.

She didn’t need to look to know Steph was raising an eyebrow, smiling in that silently exasperated way she had. Even a decade wasn’t enough to forget to forget that look.

It also, apparently, was not enough to forget how to read Rachel’s silences.

“Okay then,” Steph said, turning back in Rachel’s direction and taking her injured wrist into a hand like some kind of _gotcha_. “How’s Chloe Price doing?”

“This isn’t — Jakob is fucking nosy for telling you about her, is how she’s doing.” Rachel growled. She snatched her hand back and looked away, but a sigh forced itself from her lungs before long, and after a pause she was meeting Steph’s gaze again.

Her laughter was the lightness of ringing bells. “Jakob has never been nosy about you two a day in his life. He cares about you too much.” She leveled Rachel with another look, then. Judgmental, and not. Appraising, and not. It felt like years before she spoke again. “Is she being good to you? I know your girl’s had a rough go of it lately. Tell me this isn’t a repeat of…”

The fight left Rachel all at once. Not in a breath, but in a wave. Her bandaged hand went unbidden to her throat. “No,” she mumbled, trailing off from even that. “No. God, no, she would never.”

A hum. A breath. A touch. “You mean that.”

“I do,” Rachel said confidently. “I do.”

“So, why don’t you two leave?”

Rachel froze. Rachel frowned. “What.”

“Why are you still here, Rachel? After everything you’ve been put through…I would’ve expected you to disappear years ago.”

“Like you did? I know the stories; how’d that work out for _you?_ ”

 _Everyone_ knew the stories. The tale about how Steph ran away from her responsibilities as heir to build a new life for herself. The tale about how her family waited just long enough for her to find happiness before hunting her down, killing nearly all of her closest friends, and dragging her back across the country; demanding obedience with the lives of those few who survived as leverage.

Rachel’s thoughts drifted again to Frank. To Jakob. She hadn’t even tried to leave, not really, just wanted to get _away,_ and…

As above, so below. Time was a flat circle. No matter the distance, death dragged them all back, eventually.

A meaningful silence sparked on the edge of Rachel’s next exhale. Neither of them said another word, but neither did they move apart. Someone, a magician Rachel didn’t know, didn’t care to know, walked by with a fresh glass of champagne. She swiped it, drank the entire thing in one gulp, and handed it back, shooing them away through the look of disgust and confusion.

When they were alone again, she held out a hand, waiting for Steph to accept. There was more to say, but she couldn’t bring herself to have that conversation. Showing would have to be enough.

Why hadn’t she left? She didn’t know. But she knew why she hadn’t tried.

Steph’s magic, when she accepted — no more than a quick swipe of one finger along her palm — was a roar of thunder settling between the strands of every muscle in her body. A deep and all encompassing rush as her memories of the past sorted themselves out and stretched through the distance.

_Oh, so you’re my punishment, now?_

_Drum roll please…Magic is real._

_Anything for my favorite customer._

_Everyone experiences magic differently,_ Steph had explained, back when Rachel first learned what it did to Jakob.

Happier times.

Distinctly less happy was the look of pity Steph hit her with the moment she pulled away. The moment she _knew._

“Don’t,” Rachel said, halfway to a scowl.

“It isn’t pity,” she explained, but Rachel’s expression must have stayed shadowed in suspicion, because Steph smiled a tired sort of smile and looked back over the crowd before continuing. “Concern, maybe? I always knew you were special.” She stopped for a moment, brow drawing down as she slipped deep into thought. It was almost a surprise when she continued. “If anyone can make it out of here and live to tell the tale, it’s you. You’ve always had a knack for surviving.”

Rachel scoffed at that, an overwrought mix between cough, and snort, and very pointed exhale. She could have said more. About the hurt, or the witches, or the magic, or the bond. Steph could have said more. But they didn’t. Neither of them.

And so, instead, they returned to their less than comfortable silence, looking out over the crowd of unfamiliar magicians. Rachel didn’t bother learning faces, but she could pick out the Houses they belonged to by their colors. A red pin here, a white cufflink there; gold, and black, and silver.

As if sensing the retreat back to herself, Steph gently nudged her shoulder.

“When you do finally work up the courage? Cause some damage on your way out,” she said, quiet enough that even the few strangers on the edge of the crowd pretending not to listen wouldn’t have managed to overhear. “Convince that Chloe to burn a few things down for me. She seems the type.”

The candidness caught Rachel entirely off guard, and almost before she could stop herself, she was ducking her head in an embarrassment that wasn’t quite embarrassment. Opened up and read like a book after one single spell. Understanding from anyone but Chloe was rare, lately. Encouragement was rarer. She’d forgotten what Steph could be like.

Why was she still there? She didn’t know. Jakob only ever asked, and Chloe stopped broaching the subject years ago, more than content to spend the days by her side no matter where they were, but…

But if someone believing — if _Steph_ believing — that she could leave was all it took to push her over that edge…She didn’t know what was holding her back, anymore. And that meant something.

“Nathan Prescott. How nice to see you,” Steph said then. She sounded happy enough. Pleasant enough. But just barely off. Carefully hidden suspicion.

Rachel hadn’t even heard someone approach.

The man in question — a boy, really — had too-neat, too-styled hair, and was dressed in a too-expensive suit that barely seemed to fit his lanky, wiry limbs. He smiled and it looked _wrong_ , and respectfully bowed his head, and it looked _worse,_ and realization hit Rachel like a punch to the gut, sparking anger — and rage, and suspicion, and rage, and fear, and rage, and fury, and rage, and _rage_ — to life.

He was the future laid out for her. He carried himself like her father. Like Frank. A monster in the shape of a man.

If he noticed her anger, he didn’t react.

“Rachel Amber,” he said instead, voice like shredded up silk. “You look lovely.”

Rachel smiled at that. She didn’t care how insincere it came off. She didn’t answer, and Nathan pushed ahead with all the ease of someone intimately familiar with captive audiences.

“I was wondering, assuming Miss Black here doesn’t need you for anything else, if we could speak in private.”

Still, Rachel didn’t answer. But before Steph could come up with some way, some excuse, or lie, or truth to rescue her, Rachel accepted with a nod and gestured out to the ballroom, following silently behind as Nathan led them to a nearby table. He signaled for two more drinks. She took them both. She drank them both. She did not speak.

“I know you’d like to hurt me,” Nathan said then, and lay one upturned palm across the table. “Would you like to give it a try right now? The things I was hoping to discuss have to do with our…Situation. The sooner you work your anger out, the better.”

A voice in Rachel’s head, one that sounded like Chloe but wasn’t; one she rarely listened to because it only appeared when she was inching up against drunk; one she rarely listened to because it was _right_ far too often, warned her not to accept.

Indulging monsters, and all that.

Never paid off.

She ignored the voice, ignored the seeds of concern that ignoring it left her with, and she reached out, weighing her power down on Nathan’s body in a slow, steady build.

He barely twitched.

He barely reacted beyond a subtle shift, colors spilling past the lines of his own body as if her magic had simply passed straight through him.

And that wasn’t how anything worked.

“Good? Okay then. Let’s discuss Chloe Price.” He sounded no more put out than if a house fly had landed on his shoulder.

Were Rachel anyone else, she might have reacted differently. Had her last few nights played out even slightly less terribly, she might have felt a rush of something like fear. Instead, a curiosity burned, and burned, and burned within her. She knew nerves like she knew breathing. Like she knew seeing. She knew nerves well enough to drown someone in pleasure or send their body crumpling uselessly to the floor, unable to speak, barely able to breathe; a limp, trembling mess that wouldn’t recover until _she_ willed it. Her control was second to none.

Nathan cleared his throat, unblinking as he met Rachel’s gaze. “Normally, I would just have someone kill her and be done with it. Ordinaries are all so…”

She knew nerves.

“But I knew you wouldn’t like that.”

She knew pain.

“So instead, I have an offer.”

And Nathan Prescott shouldn’t still have been standing. But it was okay.

“Her safety for your involvement. The same offer I made Jakob Murton, by the way; I understand you two are close. Hopefully, his being a part of things will convince you this is all for the best. You could save Chloe Price’s life.”

Because Rachel knew, too, how to be a trophy. It didn’t matter what lies Nathan Prescott conjured up, what stories he tried to make her believe. She could be silent. She could listen. She could watch. She knew monsters. And before the night was over, she would know _exactly_ what just happened.

~*~

Like it did around her father, time ran together the longer Nathan Prescott talked.

The ceremony itself hadn’t yet begun, but the crowd was long since herded into another room, far more cathedral than the last. A dais stood at the head with rows and rows of beautifully maintained pews stretching back to the entrance. The walls were made of the same empty night sky as the ballroom. The ceiling stretched on forever.

There were, Rachel knew, similar places hidden away in Amber House, but without the gold trim, without the swarms of guards, or the hum of familiar magic, it all felt just bit like stepping through a mirror into another universe.

She looked to her phone to distract herself.

**Jakob:** Something happened. Steph with me. Stay put.

 **Jakob:** Don’t hurt anyone.

Apparently, the texts had come just as Nathan filed them into their seats. Half an hour ago.

**Rachel:**??????????

She wasn’t expecting an answer, but it was always worth at least trying with Jakob. Occasionally, he remembered she liked to know things. And in the meantime, she had the sound of Nathan Prescott going on, and on, and _on_ beside her to fill the silence.

Would have, at least, had he not made yet another vague, incoherent threat on Chloe’s life.

“Oh my fucking god,” Rachel interrupted, thankful Nathan’s insistence on sticking to the back row meant enough separation from the crowd to get comfortably angry, even if she couldn’t quite be _loud._ “Just tell me what you _want._ You’ve spent the past forty fucking minutes trying to sound intimidating and talking yourself in a circle. Do you want to kill Chloe; is that what this is? Are you gonna do it in front of me and wait for me to swoon? What is the end goal for your big evil plan?”

Nathan smiled that ceaseless smile of his and turned his gaze toward the altar at the front of the chapel. Church. Cathedral. Whatever it was. Wherever they were.

He cleared his throat quiet enough not to bother the crowd. “I assure you it isn’t evil. As I told you before, I don’t want to kill her. I’m asking for your involvement, not your obedience.”

“You’re not _asking_ for anything. You’re rambling about my girlfriend and _the future_ like some teenage dipshit that just got his hands on shitty mids and found out what a lesbian is for the first time in his life,” Rachel said, slipping into the territory of not quite quiet enough. Several heads turned their way.

Nathan smiled and waved them off, watching them turn and lose interest as if commanded. And then something odd happened. Nathan shuddered, again, like he had when her magic passed through him.

Except that Rachel hadn’t used her magic.

Her heart skipped. Just once. Enough to get her attention. Not in fear, not in worry, not in any emotion she could have had or named in that moment. Her heart stuttered like someone had shoved a hand through her chest and _squeezed,_ and she would have reacted; would have spoken; would have done anything at all had the rest of her body been willing to listen. But it wasn’t. She was trapped in ice she couldn’t see. She was frozen, unable to feel anything but slowly intensifying pain as it crawled up the thread of every nerve and every vein, thousands of invisible pinpricks beneath her skin gathering together and spreading apart with each breath she forced out like a chorus of daggers.

“What I’m asking for,” Nathan said coolly, only after her hearing returned. His voice was changed, sharper, and rougher. Rachel couldn’t look, couldn’t turn to see, but she had the distinct impression from the way the air went bitter and stale, flowing around him like a current forcibly redirected, that whatever sort of magic he was using was the cause of that strange shudder. “What I _want,_ is to keep you safe. What I want is to stay alive long enough to stop our parents from killing us. I would think you do too.”

Rachel laughed. She tried to laugh, anyway. The muscles didn’t quite work. The sounds didn’t quite come. She gulped down a breath when the hold on her throat finally receded, and an insult spilled out, reshaped in that pressure before she could stop it. “You’re a fucking child if you think this hurts enough to scare me.”

For a moment, Nathan went absolutely still, and Rachel half expected him to crank whatever invisible dial he was leaning on to make the pain worse in some impotent rush of insecurity. But then he leaned forward, balancing his elbows on his lap, both the fight in him and the force holding Rachel in place receding, evaporating, fading away to nothing.

He tried, then, to explain himself.

 _Tried_ being the key word, because Rachel wasn’t listening, not when listening was how every single monster she’d ever let into her life caught her and trapped her in a never ending spiral to rock bottom. Instead, she watched. She watched the way he moved, the way he spoke, the way he acted like he wasn’t quite sure how to exist in a state of calm. A storm of violence just barely restrained, barely kept hidden beneath the surface.

She watched, too, the way his magic seemed to grow visible, tangible, the longer he went on. It was like the aura of invisible pressure and undeniable presence she’d felt around Chloe, but _there_ in front of her, physical and real.

She thought, at first, that she was only imagining things. The champagne and the stress of her past few days — Chloe breaking down in front of her, Chloe hurting her, Chloe loving her, accepting her, trusting her, wanting her, leaving her, loving her, and, and, and — finally catching up and turning the cracks along her sanity into full blown breaks.

Not least of all because on top of the hallucinations, she could _feel_ Chloe’s presence. It wasn’t words, not like before when she’d known what it was and was only trying not to accept it. It was more abstract, as if her will had somehow stretched between them, soothing, and relaxing, and calming as well as Chloe had ever been able to manage being any of those things. It was the core of her life, the heart of her self, beating in Rachel’s chest as if it were her own.

And it was growing louder. Stronger. Harder to ignore.

Her mind breaking one step further beneath the stress and conjuring up ridiculous images of safety and security was something she could understand, at least. Only, something happened then.

The false Chloe in her chest grew deafening, reshaped into the form of a question.

_Will you reach out?_

_For me?_

Rachel did, too disoriented to disagree or deny it. She reached out, glancing across the room, and…It wasn’t just Nathan, anymore. It was as if she could see the magic _everywhere,_ bleeding off of every body, countless oil-licked strands floating through the air like wisps of smoke.

“— Your father doesn’t value your life,” Nathan said, not paying her any attention and already moved onto some other subject. As if she didn’t already know. As if that revelation were something she was meant to be impressed by.

She returned her gaze to _his_ magic. Every strand was fraying and broken; dried up, and seconds from crumbling. It was completely unlike the rest. Where the magic of the walls, of the House, of the people in the crowd was a fundamental part of them, Nathan’s was…A shield. Armor. Something wrapped around him protectively without truly touching. Hiding him. Containing him. Rachel reached out for a stray flicker of it drifting through the air, making sure to move slow enough that he didn’t notice.

“You only matter to him as a chance for more power,” he went on. She knew that much, too.

The tips of her fingers brushed it, and it _reacted,_ bouncing away in perpetual weightlessness before dissolving into nothing in the empty air of the room.

And still, Nathan seemed oblivious.

 _Reach out,_ that false Chloe asked once again.

Without waiting to test the limits of his awareness, she listened. She sank a hand through the barrier, gripping at his arm and _pushing_ with her mind until the full force of her magic surged forth, trapping Nathan in a rush of pain like a man caught in an electric current. His every muscle tensed to the point of rippling. His jaw clenched nearly hard enough to crack.

Calmly, curiously, Rachel watched him struggle against her. For a moment, his eyes began to roll back in his head, but she pulled the magic back just far enough to keep him on the razor thin edge of consciousness. Just far enough to keep him silent.

“Let me be very clear, Nathan: I don’t care,” she said, leaning close, and close, and closer. “I am done with you. I am done with my father. And I am done with every single jackass _like_ you who thinks I spend my days waiting for a fucking knight in shining armor to sweep me off my feet. I am a _very_ talented magician, and I can solve my problems my own god damn self. Don’t ever forget that.”

Somewhere beneath the tension in his throat, Nathan gagged on air, consciousness slipping again. But rather than ease back, Rachel let it soak deeper. She used every memory of every beating she’d ever taken, every drug she’d ever been forced to swallow, every bed she’d ever been unable to leave, as her strength, and she bared all of it down on him.

Others might have hurt her before, but Nathan Prescott would never get the chance.

“If you _ever_ threaten me again,” she asked, finally pulling back far enough to see him nod. “Remember this feeling. _This_ is real pain.”

Rachel let go then, watching as he scrambled away, grasping at his chest and gulping down air. He stumbled, trying to move to his feet, but his limbs were worn, the connections burned raw after her work, so by the time he’d nearly pushed to standing, his body was already giving out and sending him tumbling into the middle of the aisle.

“Fine,” he growled in an absolutely broken voice, oblivious to the crowd’s attention. “I tried being —”

The massive double doors at the entrance burst open, interrupting him.

Steph and Jakob stood on the threshold, eyes dragging over every face in the crowd until they finally settled on… _Her._ It could have been a coincidence, Rachel knew. But there was someone else with them. Someone who had absolutely no business being there. Someone with blue hair. Someone dressed in an old gauzy tank top and jeans barely held together by anything more than clothespins and a prayer. Someone with intricately tattooed vines and blossoms, extensions of the rose Rachel knew covered her back, stretching over one shoulder and down to the wrist.

The room fell suddenly deathly quiet. The room was spinning. The room was suffocating. Nathan was laughing. And suddenly, suddenly, Rachel was in the aisle, moving closer, face to face with,

“Chloe,” she whispered, almost too quiet to hear, almost too shocked to feel.

And Chloe did something that made her throat tense up and her stomach drop out. She _smirked_ like there was a joke pointed squarely at her, placing her right hand over her chest and sliding into a bow. Right leg back, left arm extended in a ridiculous flourish, and her body nearly parallel to the ground.

It went on for an eternity. It went on for longer. It was a dream. Because it had to be a dream.

Except that Chloe peeked up, meeting her gaze, and smiling wider, and _oh,_ it might have been the most beautiful sight in the world if it weren’t already so terrifying.

Rachel swallowed. She reached out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> don't worry rachel i bet chloe's gonna say something real stupid


	12. Chloe

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Hey, so…What’s a girl like me gotta do to take a girl like you back home?”
> 
> “Honey,” Rachel drawled in that terrible accent, her eyes falling shut and her smile nearly doubling in size just as the crowd roared louder again. “You’re doin’ it.”

“Chloe,” Rachel whispered almost quietly enough to be mistaken for an exhale. Even in the silence of that sprawling chapel floating through the center of eternity, her voice barely carried the distance.

And Chloe couldn’t help it, then. She smirked.

Rachel was _nervous._

So, she bowed into the quiet, extended arm, wrist flourish and all. A proper bow. She held the pose for just long enough and then slightly longer before peeking up to lose herself in Rachel’s gaze, glowing that warm and vivid green as it was. Something was poking at the edges of her mind, and she knew — _knew_ like something that had always been a part of her — that Rachel could feel the same.

She should have been scared. Should have been terrified, probably. But the people watching, the rest of the room, the rest of the world…None of it mattered. Chloe straightened slowly, never flinching, never faltering, never losing the smile as she stepped into Rachel’s space.

Not even when Rachel’s will shed its hesitance and came crashing against the walls of her mind with such a sudden intensity that she felt she might collapse under the force of it. The fear, and longing, and love, and joy, and love, and love, and _love —_

Not even when the rest of the world — everything but them, everything but _Rachel_ — faded away in wisps of golden light.

Not even when she grasped the hand Rachel was reaching hesitantly forward, pressed her lips to the back of the palm, just below her blazer’s cuff, and asked with all the confidence in the world, “What the fuck is up, my dude?”

Breaking through possibility, the room went somehow quieter. The absence of sound became the absence of anything.

In that moment, they may as well have been the only two people in the universe.

Confidently as she could, Chloe held Rachel’s gaze.

She waited.

And waited.

And waited.

And then, in the space of a single exhale, relief thick enough to blind had Rachel doubling over in powerful waves of wheezing laughter, the sound of it echoing through the room and bouncing off the walls that weren’t walls, racing through the dark that wasn’t, and shaking the world at its foundation. She stumbled, scrambling forward to grip at Chloe’s shoulders, laughing, and laughing, and laughing until her face was buried in the crook of her neck, where she laughed, and laughed, and laughed some more.

“Idiot,” Rachel wheezed, somewhere between a snort and a cackle; barely more than the faintest shape of words. “Fucking dumbass.”

“Oh, I’m _hella_ stupid.”

“You are,” Rachel chuckled. “Never say hella again.”

“No promises.”

Rachel’s grip went tighter. “Lucky for you, I think I can be bothered to love you anyway.”

Smile barely restrained to the bleeding edge of _shit eating,_ Chloe asked, “That _is_ lucky. How much love are we talkin’, here?”

Rachel’s lips crashing against hers served as a simple enough answer. The resulting flood of emotion and sensation; tides of feeling and every nerve ending sparkling with warmth like fireworks rising to drown out the noise of her mind served as more. It took every shred of strength in her to stay standing as Rachel’s entire sense of self surged into her. Hands were in her hair, at her jaw, on her neck, softer than a whisper and still enough to rip her apart down to the soul. To tear it to shreds and piece it back together again, over, and over, and over.

Rachel was the first to give in. She pulled away and tumbled back, resting her forehead against Chloe’s.

“Reign it in; it’s only been a day, Rach,” Chloe said, like they weren’t in the most dangerous place in the world, surrounded by more money and magic than Chloe had ever known in her life. She was dimly aware of some few members of the crowd gasping, whispered waves of shared rumors rippling outward in their shock, but none of it mattered. She opened her eyes, and none of it mattered.

“It’s been a busy one,” murmured Rachel. She breathed out another laugh, and it resonated through Chloe’s bones like a ringing bell through stone. The aftershock of emotion carried on the shape of unspoken words. “A lot’s happened.”

“Every day’s a busy one with you,” Chloe answered coolly enough. Her attention was drifting to the light she had barely begun to notice, earlier: the light surrounding them like golden flames, wisping and swaying back, and forth, and back again in a breeze that wasn’t there. Slowly, she reached for it, and the light moved with her, flowing and arcing in lazy trails behind her arm and her fingers like it was all coming _from_ her.

Again, she reached, still confused, still speechless.

Again, it slipped through her grasp.

Before Chloe could try again, Rachel touched her cheek. Two fingers against skin, no pressure or force at all beyond the ripple of thought against thought. Chloe’s attention snapped fully back to her.

“What,” she asked, too overwhelmed to ask more. “What _is_ this?”

Rachel ran her hand through a wisp just above Chloe’s palm and wiped it effortlessly away. She ran fingers up Chloe’s arm, her touch attracting that strange golden light and holding it close enough to burst into sparks behind her every movement.

“Magic?” Chloe asked, smiling and smiling again.

Rachel nodded, and though she didn’t speak, Chloe could feel the answer inside of her as clearly as if she had.

She looked from Rachel to the magic once again, tens, hundreds, thousands of questions building on the tip of her tongue and twice as many answers waiting to be freed from the warmth of Rachel’s mind, if only she asked.

If only she asked.

She did not.

She trusted enough not to know.

And she would have spoken up to change the subject, then, but something happened. Something stopped her. In the blink of an eye, two hands were bolting toward them both. They came from somewhere down the aisle, and it might have been startling, might even have been worrying, except that before it had the chance, both hands _burned_ as they came in contact with the flames that weren’t flames. The flames that somehow, impossibly, were. Barely seconds passed before their owner was shouting in pain, tripping backward off balance and confused. They fell to the floor and scrambled for safety until their back was pressed flat against the nearest pew, both hands clutched tight to their chest.

Chloe studied the stranger closely. He looked gaunt and stretched out; almost sickly. He was wearing a three piece suit so crisp it felt completely at odds with the fact that he seemed ready to keel over at any second.

Something clicked, then.

He was the detective’s friend. The one who could use magic. The one who felt like the threat of drowning forever in darkness, always in view of the surface and always out of reach.

She turned back to Rachel, hoping to ask, but their fire was fading, the world returning, and slowly, she realized the walls that weren’t walls — the endless, starless night trapped beyond — were _shaking._ More, that they must have been for some time, because as the light and the magic around them faded, so too did the walls begin to calm.

She turned to Rachel, hoping to ask, but the gentle rise and fall of anxious whispers in the crowd had grown to a dull hum, _the bond, the bond, the bond,_ threaded through every half muttered conversation.

She turned to Rachel, hoping to ask, but Rachel, it turned out, had a question of her own.

“How are you here?” Rachel asked, thumb gently tracing the line of Chloe’s jaw.

Chloe shrugged, already fallen back into their own little world. “How does anyone get anywhere?”

~*~

_“Chloe.”_

_Recognition came in waves. It was hard to make out the voice over the crowd, harder still to place it with a face, but the somehow-angry clacking of heels put a name on the tip of her tongue easily enough. Short silky blonde hair and the kind of resting bitch face that said ‘I’ve been starving since the nineties.’_

_Chloe stepped away from the door, shoved her hands into her pockets, and spun to face the approaching not-quite-stranger with her easiest grin. Lidded eyes, a tilted head, and movements like living underwater._

_“Hey,” she said, just the barest hint of rasp worked in. “Victoria, right? I saw a bunch of your work out there. Nice job on all this.”_

_“I know. I did good,” Victoria answered, throwing a satisfied glance over her shoulder. She looked tense._

_Chloe laughed. “So, what’s up? Am I bein’ kicked out for dress code violations? Because I’m already leaving.”_

_A million and more replies dipped in venom flashed behind Victoria’s eyes, but she gave voice to exactly none of them. She closed her eyes, breathed deep and slow, and began again._

_“Look. I’m not going to ease you into any of this like we normally do, because, frankly, between Rachel Amber and that one,” — she jabbed a thumb in a vague enough approximation of Max’s direction for Chloe to get the point — “There’s no way you haven’t already noticed the position you’re in.”_

_The obvious response would have been to deny. Shrug it all off like she had no clue what was being implied, and less clue why Rachel’s name was important. But Chloe knew more than she should. Far more than she should. And after everything…More than anything, she was tired of pretending otherwise. She didn’t know it all, but she knew enough._

_Enough to know Max wasn’t a threat. Enough to know Victoria wasn’t a threat. Enough to know she was staring down the barrel of a chance to learn more._

_“Magic?” Chloe asked, offhand and impassive._

_“Magic.” Victoria quirked a single slender brow. She sighed. “Your eyes are glowing, by the way. Blink for me.”_

_Chloe didn’t know if Victoria was telling the truth, but she doubted, too, whether it mattered. The dangers of only knowing enough tended to go that way. She blinked._

_“Better,” Victoria said, like that was that. And it was._ _“You’ll want to learn to watch that in crowds.” One more glance over her shoulder, this one longer, seeking out something or someone in particular. As her gaze settled back into place, Victoria took a single step closer. “You’ve probably guessed as much, but our group has more than one reason to be in New York. Give me your phone.”_

_“…Group,” Chloe said._

_“Group.”_

_“Max?”_

_“Yes.” Victoria very deliberately cleared her throat. “Your phone.”_

_Chloe didn’t move. Didn’t answer._

_“Fine. I won’t force it,” Victoria relented, shrugging and rolling her eyes. “Look, if you need an out…Or, no — if you_ and _Rachel Amber need an out, I want you to have my number. That’s all. We’re here to help, and we’ll_ be _here to help until we can’t anymore.”_

_The noise of the crowd grew faintly louder. Quieter. Louder, again. The natural rise and fall of conversation, amplified with every new word._

_Chloe blinked slowly._

_She didn’t know it all, but she knew enough. She knew how to recognize danger. Victoria wasn’t it. Their life in New York though…_

_It wasn’t worth it. It hadn’t been for years, really, and it was clear enough ever since that disaster with Joyce that the only reason either of them were still sticking around was because they’d both lost the courage to speak up. It was long past time they disappeared._

_“I’m guessing,” Chloe said. “The day you ‘can’t anymore’ is close.”_

_Victoria didn’t answer. Chloe handed over her phone._

~*~

“Chloe.”

“Who knows,” Chloe said, slipping back into an easy lopsided grin. “I might have caused a bit of a scene out front, by the way.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

And she would have kept going, joking and sidestepping to see Rachel hide her joy behind harsh words and sharper touch, but then Jakob was there, shattering their easy back and forth into nothing.

“You wandered the city bleeding off enough magic to scare anyone who got too close. Even people who don’t know about any of this,” he said. Surprise shot through the crowd.

Rachel, too, because suddenly her attention was firmly on Jakob, Chloe herself forgotten even as Rachel’s grip on her went tighter, and tighter, and tighter. “But —”

“I know. She _isn’t._ But she’s something. I know you know that,” Jakob said like a reminder, the whole of past conversations sat unspoken in the dark of his eyes. “She found a building that shouldn’t exist and strolled right through the front door. That doesn’t just happen.”

Rachel had nothing to add. Chloe had no idea where to start.

Jakob continued. He looked tired, drenched in the exhaustion of someone who could see the end of their fight hanging just out of reach. “And then she knocked out the two magicians standing guard like it was nothing. Wasn’t sure _how_ until you two put on this little light show. The burns make sense, now.”

The shock in crowd solidified, crystallized, and dropped, even the faintest of whispers quieted down in favor of hanging on Jakob’s every word. Rachel was watching him like she was on the edge of a realization she didn’t want to make.

But Chloe couldn’t follow.

She didn’t _want_ to, either. She had wanted to find Rachel to quiet the roar in her mind, and now that she had her, she wanted…She didn’t know. But it wasn’t whatever was happening. It wasn’t to be made a spectacle in a play she couldn’t follow starring people she didn’t know.

“Do you mind? We were, like, kind of having a moment here,” Chloe said, nowhere near as harsh as she intended. She scanned the faces in the crowd, and with a resigned sigh, dipped Rachel low and caught her in another kiss before setting her back on both feet. She stayed close enough to stroke absentminded patterns over the small of Rachel’s back, attention only partially moved to Jakob. “Never mind. So, I was with Max, tonight.”

Jakob nodded solemnly, permission to continue.

“She is like, _insanely_ good at all that photography shit, by the way,” Chloe said, the pull of Rachel’s presence already turning her attention back in that direction. “Like, I spent a lot of my time at that show wishing you were there to see it all with me. And…Then I started hearing you. And _feeling_ you? Like, that thing you showed me in bed the other night, when we were…I could hear your thoughts.” Several members of the audience gasped at the admission, but Chloe pushed ahead, reaching up to trace the bruise at Rachel’s throat. “I couldn’t stop them from coming. You were…Angry. But it was more than that.”

Rachel’s eyes flickered as she spoke. She was beautiful. “I felt you, too.”

Chloe absolutely beamed. “Anyway. You led me here, but judging by, uh…Everything. I’m not sure you meant to.”

“ _Oops,_ ” Rachel breathed. She looked anything but sorry.

Two men in suits passed them by, either oblivious or uncaring. They grabbed the detective’s friend with the newly burned hands by the shoulders, and his body went immediately limp.

From there, everything fell apart.

A man with the same sense of wrongness as Rachel’s father; a man dressed the same, talking the same, acting the same, and yet completely, utterly different, stood abruptly in his seat.

Rachel’s father, Chloe realized, was nowhere in sight.

“One moment,” the man said. Too calm. Too level. “Miss Black, Mister Murton, before your men drag my son away for whatever crimes he has doubtlessly committed, I demand to know what is happening. Who is this girl? How has such a talented magician escaped our notice until now?”

A fairly understandable question, Chloe thought. Except that then _everyone_ in the crowd had questions, and _everyone_ in the crowd decided those questions deserved to be heard, and whatever sense of order there had been in the before was long lost to the noise.

The older woman who had led Chloe to the chapel along with Jakob stepped forward and whistled for attention. The crowd quieted in an instant. She explained.

Chloe didn’t much care to follow. Something about an investigation into a man named Nathan Prescott. Something about a grab for power between the already rich and already powerful. Nathan Prescott himself, assuming he was the stranger, the detective’s friend, the one being discussed, was no longer anywhere to be found, doubtlessly carried from the room somewhere in the midst of the yelling.

Chloe knew enough. She didn’t need to know more.

Rachel climbed into her arms.

One foot pressed down on the back of her knee for balance, startling her back to awareness, and then Rachel was _there,_ arms around her shoulders and ankles locked behind her waist.

“Hi,” Rachel said, lips ghosting over Chloe’s cheek.

Chloe bounced Rachel slightly higher in her grip and adjusted her stance to match. “Hey, so…What’s a girl like me gotta do to take a girl like you back home?”

“Honey,” Rachel drawled in that terrible accent, her eyes falling shut and her smile nearly doubling in size just as the crowd roared louder again. “You’re doin’ it.”

~*~

“Chloe.”

“What.”

“Chloe god damn Price.”

Chloe grit her teeth. She did not answer. She patted herself down again.

Rachel didn’t let it go. “Are you telling me my beautiful girlfriend, the stars in my sky, the light of my life, the sun to my moon, can’t hack a simple keycard lock?”

The look in her eyes was the purest form of mischief. Chloe sighed.

“I am telling you,” she grumbled. “I have no clue how to hack a simple keycard lock.”

The way Rachel smiled, the way she tapped Chloe’s hip with her own and set to work, like she was at all times prepared for the possibility that Chloe would lock herself out of her own apartment, was more beautiful than anything she had ever known. Chloe pressed her lips to the crown of Rachel’s head.

~*~

“Chloe!” An all too familiar voice boomed from the hall. The door nearly broke off its hinges when its owner started knocking.

Rachel answered in her place, barely stepping out of the way in time to avoid being crushed when Jakob barreled inside.

Chloe stayed by the stove, burgers sizzling away. Jakob took the moment to collect himself.

“Hungry?” she asked, a growing spike of fear growing just beneath the surface.

Jakob nodded sharply at whatever thought was occupying his mind and turned to Rachel, dragging her out into the hall and very distinctly out of earshot. After a pause, Chloe removed the pan from the heat and padded closer to the door.

“How is that asshole _gone_?” drifted in through the crack. Rachel was holding it open.

They could have been talking about anyone. Rachel’s father. The man who moved like Rachel’s father. The detective’s friend. The detective himself. Or even someone else. It could have been about her. It could have been about Rachel. People tended to hate them both equally, given the chance. She didn’t know.

_Look, if you need an out…_

She didn’t know.

“— guards are all dead —” Jakob said in the closest thing to a whisper he was capable of managing. He faded in and out of clarity. “— made an impression.”

“I know she has. He didn’t shut up about it. What’s your point?”

“— after your _show_ tonight, he’s —”

“I’m not going back to that place.”

“— the safest —”

Rachel barked a laugh. “Really? Him? _Safe?_ ”

“— I know. But —”

“No! I will _not_ go crawling back to that asshole after everything he’s done. If you can’t make yourself feel safe without protecting us, figure out a way to do it _here._ ”

Nothing. Silence.

And then, “God damn it, Rachel.”

“Yes, God damn it, me. What now? We're not leaving, and I will drop you to the ground if you so much _think_ about trying to drag us out of here.”

Something inaudible.

Another pause.

“ _Well?_ ”

“I’m not leaving you two alone.”

“Then _come on in,_ ” Rachel said bitterly. “Park your idiots outside if you need them.”

As she stepped back inside, Rachel smiled a forced sort of smile. It didn't reach her eyes. She kissed Chloe on the chin, gentle waves of herself spilling between them, and Chloe understood with every fiber of her being that she wasn’t the only one ready to leave. Exposing the apartment so fully to that part of Rachel’s life was as good as abandoning it. They were staying the night, and they were never looking back.

~*~

“Chloe,” Rachel whispered, lips brushing against her ear.

The world was muffled noises tuned so low they were nothing but bass rumbling through her. Blurred half-fog and darkness. Heavy lungs and the pleasure of touch stretched bone deep.

Chloe snorted in a breath and startled awake. Her lips were dry. Her mouth was dry. Her face was buried in Rachel’s chest, the rest of her sprawled out beneath a blanket and dangling off the other end of the couch.

It earned her the lightest rumble of a chuckle in answer. “Baby, you were snoring.”

“ _You_ were snoring,” Chloe said, already drifting back into the embrace of sleep.

In her final moments of lucidity, she caught a glimpse of Jakob, arms folded, deep in thought where he stood nearer the front door.

~*~

~*~

“— Chloe, too.”

A hum brought Chloe back, the next time.

“Really?” A voice that couldn’t have belonged to anyone but Rachel asked. “Even after that time when she—”

“Mhm. They didn’t press the point, but they miss you both.”

“Huh.” Rachel nuzzled into the top of Chloe’s head, scratching nails lightly over the back of her neck, and the world turned blurred and unsteady once again. “Maybe someday.”

~*~

~*~

~*~

“Chloe!”

A heavy thud sounded somewhere behind her. The force of cracked plaster and shattered glass shook the entire apartment.

“What —” she tried, groggy and delirious, her heart pounding a million miles a minute.

Rachel cupped her face between both hands. She looked terrified. Her eyes were glowing, and her every word was felt as powerfully as it was heard. “Chlo, baby, we have to go right now. Wake up.”

Energy rushed through Chloe’s body as she spoke, an ice cold pulse of awareness like adrenaline itself pulled in through skin. She woke up. She woke up so intensely that _waking up_ felt like an understatement.

And when she was level and breathing steady, the first sight waiting for her, the thing standing in the entrance, was a ghost. A dead man. He looked emptied of blood. He looked like he was barely clinging to life.

“…David?” she asked, but was given no answer.

The thing that couldn’t have been him flicked a wrist like a marionette barely still on its strings, and suddenly Chloe was hurtling weightlessly through the air. She was living a nightmare all over again. She was back in that place that wasn’t her home. Back with that man that wasn’t her father, back flying through the night as if she were nothing more than some small, weightless…

She crashed into the kitchen cabinets. Strips of plywood snapped like whips against her back and sent her tumbling down onto the kitchen counter.

Breathing didn’t work. Moving didn’t work. Nothing worked. The world was starburst flashes of pain from the inside out and the outside in. She watched Jakob, seemingly unconscious and crumpled against the far wall. She watched Rachel, staring back at her from the other side of the room, every bit as confused, every bit as terrified, every bit as frozen, rooted in place.

The difference, however, was that Rachel still had the presence of mind to channel that fear into rage. Her eyes grew lighter and brighter until they were burning like stars, and that fire that wasn’t, that magic that longed to be seen, returned in a breath.

Rachel was in her mind, then, not speaking, not asking, not taking, but _giving_ until Chloe was relaxed and settled on the brink of consciousness, pain and worry long forgotten beneath a blurred haze of comfort. She could barely still speak, barely still think —

Rachel’s presence vanished.

And then she _moved,_ storming furiously toward the threshold, toward David. She pulled a knife from the block on the counter and without hesitating, without blinking, sank it into his chest, and pushed, and pushed, and pushed until they were both crashing into the hall.

_Look, if you need an out…_

Chloe inhaled slowly. Even slower, she pushed to her feet. Her limbs were barely listening. They felt heavier than lead.

 _…if you_ and _Rachel Amber need an out…_

Her vision wavered. Her legs gave out beneath her. Another loud crash echoed in from the hall, and her world went black.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'm not the happiest with this one even after giving it an extra week, but i'm dunking it over here before i let myself take an entire month to continue making minor edits on what is honestly one of the shorter chapters of this thing
> 
> anyway, thanks to everyone leaving comments and kudos, and thanks to everyone who isn't. i appreciate you sticking around through this big dumb au. hopefully you're all staying safe!


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